Algeria, Indians, the New Left, and Boomer-itis: How does this story end?

At the end of my second year of college, I participated in a student-led takeover of our college administration building, in protest of the college’s decision to offer an honorary degree to media mogul Ted Turner. The protest against Turner had been building for months, beginning with meetings held by Proud Indigenous Peoples for Education, one of the many “cultural” organizations funded by the student government, and the most visible indigenous peoples’ organization on our campus. For many years, indigenous rights organizations had been building strong bases of support, organizing around issues related to the use of “Indian” mascots in professional sports. The concerns that PIPE raised had grown out of this movement. How, they asked, could our college, located in the middle of the Twin Cities—home to one of the largest, most vibrant, and politically active American Indian communities in the country—invite the owner of the Atlanta Braves to be part of our annual commencement ceremonies?

Although PIPE had probably less than ten members, the concerns they raised resonated with other students and cultural organizations. Our college prided itself on its commitment to internationalism and cultural diversity; as students, we were highly attuned to the ways in which its rhetoric did not match our reality. Cultural organizations were typically expected to perform difference in order to substantiate the college’s diversity, yet there was little in the way of institutional support for our organizations outside the funds they received through the student government. Students wanted to see that the energy that they had devoted to creating the aura of diversity—something the college was quick to exploit in student recruitment and development campaigns—was being reciprocated at the institutional level, whether in terms of an expanded office of multicultural affairs, a campus-wide commitment to anti-racism workshops, or greater community outreach. At the very least, we wanted some assurance that our efforts were recognized as both significant contributions to the college, and as a form of work. Students sacrificed a great deal to keep those organizations up and running and reaching out to the community at large, and by offering Ted Turner an honorary degree, we felt that the college had insulted us, and denigrated the ways in which we expressed our commitment to it.

The Turner campaign built for many months. At first, it seemed as if there was not enough energy to galvanize students outside the cultural organizations. As we neared commencement, however, the campaign began to pick up speed. Our closed-door meetings, polite sit-downs with administrators, and consciousness-raising exercises gave way to more vocal protests, with student and community leaders taking their message to the quad. In one very memorable instance, members of the American Indian Movement came to campus, and Clyde Bellecourt spoke, at length, about the history of indigenous peoples’ activism in Minnesota, and the place of Native peoples in the greater struggle for social and economic justice. There was drumming, and we danced, and immediately afterward, a small group of us—led by the intrepid Janel Stead—crossed to the administration building, determined to make an appointment with the college president. Janel may have been the only person who understood this (I certainly didn’t, then) but the time had come to force the issue. With barely a week to go before commencement, and support for the campaign growing by the day, there was no question that the college would be willing to take our demands seriously. While our administrators were always willing to talk, now they would have to negotiate. We scheduled a meeting for the next morning and went off to figure out our strategy.

The date, incidentally, was May 5, 1998, and that evening, my friends Brett and Bill and I inaugurated a tradition that we would continue to observe for many years: the celebration of Karl Marx’s birthday. The three of us were to live together that summer, and we had decided that we would read Capital, for the first time, together. The logic of this decision escapes me, although I suspect that our interest in Marx had something to do with the loose, largely uninformed way in which many of our professors dismissed him and his work. As anti-authoritarian as post-structuralism may be, on our campus, in the late 1990s, it was orthodoxy, and the stridently authoritarian manner in which it was presented was bound to inspire a backlash. So, with little direction or plan, and some dismissive criticism from even the most sympathetic professors, we set out to read the big book. On Marx’s birthday, we celebrated that commitment, as we celebrated him, with vodka and Kool-Aid, not entirely attentive to the irony. That night, well after dark, we ran around campus, copying out quotes from Marx’s more famous writings in sidewalk chalk. On the path leading to the administration building, Brett transcribed a passage from the Brumaire: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please….The tradition of all the dead generations lies like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

Those were the words that greeted us the next morning when we arrived for our meeting with the president. I don’t remember much of the meeting, except that Vernon Bellecourt was with us, and after it became clear the administration did not want to negotiate, he pulled out his cell phone. We found this horribly amusing. Within minutes, however, AIM security had shown up, and the rest of us had gone into action mode. I went back to my room to collect some supplies while others took up positions around the building. By ten, we were entrenched, and while we allowed work to go on as usual, our energy, our enthusiasm, and our presence transformed the space. Protest should not be thought of as an end in itself, but protests have a sort of performative power that is, for lack of a better word, intoxicating, transformative. From his reading of St. Paul, Agamben tells us that, in the post-Messianic future, everything will be as it is now, but different. While this may seem like an unbearable bit of sophistry, it offers a relatively economical description of what a protest is like. Protests take place in space, they occupy space, and they transform it; they release the inherent, suppressed possibilities of a space, giving play to unthought of relations between people, places, and things. Everything is as it was before, but everything is different; some new, intangible, unquantifiable magic has been introduced into the world, and once you’ve felt it, it’s difficult to let that go.

The news spread quickly. While I was in my room, a friend who was involved in desegregation work in Minneapolis called me to ask if I could be at a meeting that night. Very abruptly, I told him that I couldn’t talk, and explained the situation. He got very excited. “Adam, why didn’t you tell me?!” he demanded, clearly elated. Fifteen minutes later, he was on site, as were twenty or thirty others from his cohort. Others came and went, including students from nearby colleges and universities, and some of the local news media. Sympathetic professors came and sat with us in support; a few offered to meet with the administration on our behalf. In addition to those of us who stayed in the building, a group of students gathered below, holding signs and placards, and chanting slogans. One student, alone against the world, held a counter-protest; we realized later that it was staged for the benefit of an independent film. At some point, those of us in the building ordered pizza. All the while, members of the AIM council of elders sat on the lawn below. Janel and others would go down to confer with them throughout the day. With the bustle of activity, as the evening drew near, Marx’s words were completely obscured, only a dull, dusty shadow beneath our feet.

The occupation ended around five, when word came down that Turner had decided to decline the college’s offer of an honorary degree. None of us had expected such a decisive victory, and while we were elated at the outcome, it left us wondering about our larger purpose. The Turner campaign had helped bring into focus many otherwise vague concerns, and we had expected that the protest would mark the beginning of a longer period of negotiation over questions of curriculum development, social programming, student recruitment, and ethnic studies. Within the intellectual and social space created by the campaign, students had begun to articulate new visions of how they hoped to interface with the administration, as well as a different sense of the obligations that bound students, faculty, and staff. The Turner campaign, in other words, had become, over the course of several months, one of the most dynamic political spaces within an already-dynamic campus political environment. As students attempted to position themselves as collaborators to the institutional processes that framed, and enabled, their education, Turner was valuable as an antagonist, yet he was never much more than a symbol. Once Turner had removed himself from the conflict, much of the urgency was lost, and—despite many of our best intentions and efforts—the larger agenda was abandoned.

None of this was on our radar the night after the occupation, when we gathered to reflect on the events of the day and plan our next moves with regard to the administration. For at least the next week, we knew, there would be meetings with different administrators, including a sit-down with members of the Board of Trustees, and we had to map out strategy. At the same time, we wanted to discuss how we might move forward with our larger agenda after the loss of our star antagonist, and as we were faced with the end of the academic year. Our energy would peak, we knew, unless we were able to find new outlets, and new purposes, that would sustain us over the summer months. That evening, we asked Clyde about AIM’s plans for the summer, and whether or not there was some role that we might play in the organization during the coming months. Part of our vision was of a more active relationship between the college and local communities—something more dynamic and ongoing than the missionary outreach that went on in the name of the college’s commitment to “service”—and I think we hoped that we might use the summer to build bridges with the American Indian community of the Twin Cities. Clyde, for his part, had different ideas. The American Indian Movement was grateful for our commitment, he told us, and to honor the success of our campaign, the elders of the organization were inviting us to the annual AIM Sundance, to be held that summer, at the sacred pipestone quarries outside Pipestone, Minnesota. He gave us literature and asked for our contact information. We pressed him for advice on activism. “Just come to the Sundance,” he replied. We made our promises, and went off to study for finals.

That August, I was one of two students who took the elders up on their invitation. For ten days, my friend Emily and I camped out, with several hundred others, in empty fields near the pipestone quarries in western Minnesota. The Sundance itself took place over about six or seven days. Like the Turner protest, the ritual brought into the open a sideways reality, a world that sat alongside the material plane, but that remained, for the most part, beyond the realm of sight. The Sundance remade the world, filling it with portent, elevating our most mundane actions from the banal to the sublime. The morning after we arrived, I woke early to take part in a sun ceremony in which we greeted the dawn with drums, song, and dance. On a small hill overlooking the camp, we sang for the sun, and when the first sliver of light appeared just over the rise, it felt as if we had brought it up. We knew that the sun came because we asked it to, and from then on, everything that we did seemed desperately important, utterly ripe with purpose.

This sense was only heightened when, later that day, we marched into the woods in search of the sacred Sundance tree. The tree had to be of a certain age and height; it had to be living; and, perhaps most importantly, it had to be cut and carried to the Sundance site without ever touching the ground. When we located the appropriate specimen, its trunk was smudged with sage, and the elders prayed, while the rest of the community prepared for its removal. Over several hours, the men hacked away at it with an axe. When one tired, another would step in, and the children would take advantage of the break to rush in and scoop up the wood chips left in their wake. As the operation neared its end, and it became apparent how the tree was going to fall, those of us who held back began to arrange large timbers on the ground. They would catch the weight of the trunk and prevent it from touching the earth. After it was on the ground, we gathered around it, and with a truly spectacular measure of martial discipline, we hoisted it—all one hundred feet of living wood—above our heads, and began marching back to the camp. We carried the tree over a mile back to the Sundance grounds. After adorning the tree for the ritual, tying its branches with bundles of tobacco, we set it upright, fitting its base into a large hole that had been carved into the earth. Using ropes tied to its upper branches, we held the tree upright while others filled in the soil at its base. This final operation took about thirty minutes, during which we exhausted ourselves keeping the tree in position. When it was over, however, the tree was secure in the earth, and we had become, in the course of the afternoon, somehow sanctified. Although we were tired and sore, we had accomplished something that seemed utterly improbable, and in the act of creating the sacred space, we had become something greater than ourselves.

This is, of course, the purpose of a Sundance, which is something that Clyde knew when he invited us. Although generations of anthropologists have been thrown by the name, the Sundance is, in essence, an allegory for birth: the Sundancers spend several days making circuits around the tree, pausing to dance at each of the cardinal points. The tree is in the umbilical cord, the link to the mother, here figured as the body of the earth, and by dancing to the north, south, east, and west, the dancers salute the different spirits and spirit realms that cohabitate with our material world. On the final day of the ritual, after several days without food, the Sundancers pierce their chests with large chunks of wood or bone, before tying themselves to the sacred tree. With what remains of their strength, they fling themselves to the ground in an attempt at breaking free. They continue in this manner until their flesh tears and they are released, or they are exhausted and unable to go on. This final drama, generally referred to as “piercing,” represents the birth that is a rebirth, the transformation of the dancer, and the renewal of the community that is his support.

I have never liked to talk about the Sundance. For a long time I thought this was because of principle, because the experience of the dance was not really mine to share. While this is, in many respects, an entirely reasonable objection, in my case, it masks something far less noble. My difficulty in talking about the Sundance suggests resistance, in a purely psychoanalytic sense; resistance, here, designating something of such deeply felt personal importance that it can be approached, through language, only obliquely. The Sundance was, for me, something traumatic and formative. I can talk about it, but I cannot understand; it can be told, but not narrated. This characterization might not make sense unless I tell you that I have been tripping over these last five lines for several hours now, and that I have written and deleted several pages trying to find a way to weave together all that has come before. I can think about the Sundance, I can describe the Sundance, I can even suggest some of what the Sundance means to me; yet somehow something always goes missing, something always gets left out, something always gets in the way. What this something is, on my own, I cannot even begin to conceive.

The Turner protest, by contrast, feels as familiar as a pop hit from my youth. And like a long forgotten pop song, I can go for years without hearing it, yet when it comes on the radio, I can remember every word, hit every note. The Turner protest marked the end of a certain romance of the political, and the beginning of a more studious engagement with the question of history, politics, and social change. Perhaps the most crucial moment of the protest, with regard to these questions, came late in the day, shortly before it was announced that Turner would not be coming to campus. As he was showing a sympathetic professor around the occupied administration building, I heard one of the students who had been long active in the campaign casually remark that the protest outside looked “just like the 1960s.” The professor responded, without missing a beat, “It looks like the twenty-first century.” Reflecting on this now, twelve years later, it seems all too cute, the sort of thing that, were I making a movie, I would immediately cut from the script. Yet, when it happened, it happened to a much different person, and I took this bit of portentous tedium as fabulously revelatory. In that moment, it was as if we had passed over some previously unseen threshold, and into a world that was more fully our own. Although I did not grow up in a household that was suffused by memories of the 1960s, many of my classmates and colleagues did; and while I had only the slightest inclination of what this meant, in that moment, in that protest, it felt as if we were announcing ourselves as arbiters of a new tradition, the vessels through which something new might be realized, and something lost might be redeemed.

Except it didn’t quite happen like that. Although we began to embroider the mythology of that day even before it was over, as the protest was unfolding, these intimations were vague, at best. Over subsequent revisions, however, the story has grown, to the extent that, for myself, the events themselves have taken on a host of new meanings. In the coming months, I had a falling out with the student who made the off-hand remark I found so significant, a falling out that, on its face, had everything to do with tactics and strategy but that, I now recognize, had much more to do with the ways in which we related to the histories in which we were embedded, and the use of history as a resource in social struggle. I spent the last two years of college engaged in an almost agonizingly self-conscious study of the New Left and its history, one that was animated by a desire to figure out what went wrong, what went right, and what lessons we might apply as we moved forward. For the student with whom I quarreled, the way forward was to reject the past and move on, secure in the righteousness of the course. This is, no doubt, a caricature of something far more complex, but it feels right, if only because it continues to seem a fair characterization of contemporary youth activism. The imperative to do something—anything—often continues to hold more weight than the need to understand why one is doing something, or the need to conceive of action in terms of some larger strategy. Although I have enormous respect for the accomplishments of this sort of anarcho-libertarianism, I remain now, as then, unconvinced of its capacity to seal the deal, to mount anything more than a brazen frontal assault that will—because it is under-theorized, under-organized, and under-prepared—inevitably falter.

The flip side of this, of course, is that my protracted engagement with the past has taken me further and further from question of actual politics, so much so that my not infrequent ruminations on strategy and tactics now feel like covert explanations as to why I have so long abandoned the political. While I reject the opposition of theory to practice, in terms of emotional satisfaction, the small, often intellectual struggles in which I am typically engaged seem a poor substitute for the actual business of getting things done, of pulling the levers, of making history move.

I realize that this makes me sound unbearably self-important, the sort of intellectual bore one studiously avoids at cocktail parties. And, in some part, that is who I am, and I have almost made my peace with that fact. I am not, however, trying to impress anyone with my desperate leaps of intellectual daring; I am trying, as best I can, to explain—to myself as much as anyone—how I came to Algeria because of a set of political and intellectual commitments that were formed when I was not yet twenty. Algeria is, I have come to believe, the end of this particular story, the denouement of something I more or less stumbled into nearly fifteen years ago, the final stage of a project that is now almost complete. Algeria loomed large in the imagination of the New Left, and the New Left has long loomed large in the consciousness of my generation, particularly for those of us who found some sense of meaning, some purpose, in politics and activism. The reasons for this have to do as much with a settling of generational accounts, of trying to sort through the tortured bonds that bind us to the Boomers, the links that continually frustrate my generation in its attempts at coming into itself. In going to Algeria, then, I am hoping to accomplish something eminently practical, which may be nothing more than finding an ending to a story that I am sick of reading. But like the Sundance, however, there is something more, something unaccountable, something that I cannot quite articulate; I know I want the story to end, but I’m not yet sure how.