How do we start? How do we begin again?

This is the first segment of a much longer piece. Please stay tuned.

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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 administration'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, these questions resonated with the members of other cultural organizations. Our college prided itself on its commitment to internationalism and cultural diversity, yet, 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; nonetheless, 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. The stridently authoritarian manner in which it was often presented to us was bound to inspire a backlash. So, with little direction or plan, and 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 the words from the Brumaire that have haunted me ever since: “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.”

The next morning, when we arrived for our meeting with the president, those were the words that greeted us. I don’t remember much of what happened, except that Vernon Bellecourt did a lot of talking, and after it became clear the administration did not want to negotiate, he pulled out his cell phone. We, the students, found this horribly amusing. Within minutes, however, AIM security had shown up, and everyone 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.

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