Christian Colonial Capitalist Violence is not three separate issues. It is a single, interlocking machine whose durability comes from the seamless integration of all three components. Any attempt to reform one component is destined to fail because the other two remain intact to regenerate the oppressive logic. Click each card to learn more.
Provided the "moral license for conquest" through the Doctrine of Discovery — 15th-century papal bulls absorbed directly into U.S. law.
The Doctrine of Discovery granted European Christian monarchs divine authority to "invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue" any non-Christian peoples and seize their lands. This was absorbed into United States law in the 1823 Supreme Court case Johnson v. M'Intosh, legally nullifying Indigenous title and has been cited in federal Indian law as recently as 2005.
Quaker complicity: Under President Grant's "Quaker Policy" of 1869, Quakers operated approximately 30 of the 350+ Indian Boarding Schools. These schools were instruments of cultural genocide — suppressing languages, spiritualities, and family structures — however well-intentioned individual Quakers may have been.
Settler-colonialism aimed to permanently replace Indigenous populations through physical violence and cultural genocide — not just resource extraction.
The boarding school system — "Kill the Indian in him, and save the man" — was designed to assimilate Indigenous peoples out of existence. Children were forcibly removed from families, forbidden from speaking their languages, and subjected to widespread abuse. The intergenerational trauma from this system reverberates to this day.
Settler-colonialism is distinct from other forms of colonialism: its goal is not resource extraction alone but the permanent replacement of the original population. This requires the "elimination of the native" — a project that continues through legal, cultural, and economic means.
White land theft, resource extraction, and the deliberate dismantling of traditional Indigenous economies to create permanent dependency.
The boarding school curriculum was not designed for intellectual development but for servitude: boys trained in manual trades, girls in domestic service — generations retrained for life at the bottom of the Euro-American economic ladder. This was economic warfare that destroyed sovereign Indigenous economies.
Iowa illustrates the ongoing capitalist component: it is the most biologically colonized state in the country, with the second highest rising cancer rate and the #1 contributor to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico — all driven by colonial-capitalist farming practices that replaced Indigenous land stewardship.
A system built on dispossession does not stop at its targets. Its logic turns inward, inflicting versions of its foundational violence on the dominant society — creating a self-perpetuating cycle that prevents the multiracial coalition that could challenge the root system.
The promise of prosperity to the white working class has been broken by deindustrialization and wage stagnation. "Deaths of despair" — suicide, drug and alcohol poisoning — have surged among non-college-educated white Americans. Note: Native American mortality rates from these causes remain the highest of any group.
White Christian Nationalism functions as a "maladaptive coping mechanism" — misdirecting legitimate economic anger away from the structural sources of suffering and toward racial and cultural scapegoats. Polling data shows a strong correlation between Christian Nationalist beliefs and support for political violence.
The tools of colonial population control — military equipment, warrior mindsets — have been brought home through programs like the DoD's 1033 Program, which has transferred over $7.4 billion in surplus military equipment to local law enforcement since 1997. The public is made "less safe and less free."
Just as historic Quaker conscientious objectors refused military service on grounds of conscience, the NewCO framework calls us to refuse — actively, materially, spiritually — participation in systems of colonial capitalism. In 1969, Jeff Kisling refused the Vietnam War draft at Scattergood Friends School. He applies that same spiritual genealogy to the present crisis.
Colonial capitalism forces survival-level participation in unjust systems — a structural analogue to military conscription. Most people don't enthusiastically support extractive systems; they're conscripts. Mutual Aid provides the "rations" that make desertion possible.
Not passive refusal — but principled withdrawal of material support from colonial systems, and active redirection toward building the world that should exist. Active, embodied, costly. The standard of success is not how you feel about your growth — it's whether the conditions facing Indigenous peoples change.
Using Quaker language, frameworks, and spiritual authority to communicate decolonial imperatives to that tradition's members. When Jeff Kisling writes an "Epistle on LANDBACK," he uses a Quaker form to carry concepts that might otherwise feel foreign into a frame Friends already inhabit. Bridge-building, not appropriation.
Prefigurative work (living differently) and transformative work (changing the conditions others live under) are not equivalent. A meeting that installs solar panels is doing prefigurative work. A meeting that campaigns to protect the Meskwaki Nation's water is doing transformative work. Both matter — but they must not be confused.
Using settler access, credibility, and institutional reach to subvert colonial structures from within — in faith communities, workplaces, and financial institutions. Accomplices often do their most effective work in their own sphere, not in Indigenous community spaces.
The Ally Industrial Complex — missionaries, saviors, co-opters, parachuters — builds social capital on others' struggles without sharing the risk. Accomplice-ship means shared risk, mutual consent, sustained accountability, and genuine deference to Indigenous leadership.
Each pillar directly counters one component of the fused system. These are not discrete strategies — they are a single, indivisible praxis. A movement for LANDBACK cannot be sustained without mutual aid, and neither survives without dismantling the colonial enforcement apparatus.
Mutual Aid is defined by the principle of Solidarity, Not Charity. This distinction is foundational. Charity is hierarchical: "we" help "them," preserving the power differential. Mutual aid is horizontal and participatory: everyone comes together to solve problems we all face. It builds community infrastructure outside of and in opposition to exploitative markets.
Within the NewCO framework, mutual aid is described as "the logistics of Active Objection." The Economic Draft holds people in unjust systems by threatening survival. Mutual aid provides the material infrastructure — food, bail funds, childcare, legal defense — that makes withdrawal from those systems possible.
"You cannot ask a neighbor to desert the Economic Draft if the consequence is their family's starvation."
The critical failure mode for well-resourced faith communities is building parallel charity infrastructure that competes with existing community-led networks. The right move is to embed in, support, and follow the lead of networks already operating.
Join existing, non-hierarchical mutual aid networks — don't start competing ones
Provide material "rations": gas cards, food, bail funds, legal support — without bureaucratic overhead or donor recognition
Understand mutual aid as a political act: building dual power and reducing state dependency
Support Des Moines Mutual Aid (DMMA) and GPAS mutual aid programming
Prioritize survival needs: food, housing, healthcare, legal defense, childcare over educational programming
LANDBACK begins with an unambiguous claim: decolonization is about returning land to Indigenous peoples. And it is not a metaphor. Land acknowledgments are a starting point at most — not an endpoint. Settler futurity — the assumption that the colonial state is permanent — is itself a colonial ideology.
GPAS founder Sikowis Nobiss (Plains Cree/Saulteaux) articulates a vision beyond LANDBACK: ReMatriation — "Returning the Sacred to the Mother." This holistic, Indigenous feminist framework calls for restoring reciprocal relationships between people and land, re-centering matriarchal principles of collective care and governance, and healing the ecological devastation caused by "unfettered patriarchal violence and greed."
"Settler futurity — the assumption the colonial state is permanent — is itself a colonial ideology. LANDBACK is not unrealistic. It is necessary."
Pay a voluntary Land Tax to the Honor Native Land Fund as an ongoing act of accountability
Perform forensic title research on your meeting's land to identify specific treaty violations
Explore putting institutional land in trust for Indigenous stewardship
Divest from banks and investments that profit from fossil fuels or carceral systems
Support GPAS's ReMatriation Fund — funds land restoration, food sovereignty, cultural revitalization
Ask for explicit permission before holding gatherings or actions on traditional homelands
Abolition is a dual strategy: systematically divesting from the institutions of the carceral state — policing, prisons, surveillance — while simultaneously investing in community-based alternatives that create genuine safety.
The prison-industrial complex is the primary enforcement arm of the settler-colonial state — protecting property laws on stolen land and managing dispossessed populations. The school-to-prison pipeline is the direct successor to the logic of Indian Boarding Schools. A truly abolitionist future must be a decolonized future.
On electoral politics: The DRN framework includes a principled rejection of electoral politics as the primary vehicle for transformative change. Refusal to participate can be a conscious withdrawal of consent from a system fundamentally intertwined with capitalism and white supremacy. Electoralism diverts energy from more effective actions like building alternative institutions and mass direct action, creating an illusion of agency.
Evidence from CAHOOTS (Eugene, OR), STAR (Denver), and HEART (Oakland) shows that unarmed trained professionals can effectively handle the majority of 911 calls — reducing violence while saving resources.
Support funding for community mental health crisis response as an alternative to armed police
Divest meeting/institutional funds from banks that profit from prison industries
Provide bail funds and legal support through existing abolitionist networks
Support Indigenous-led organizations challenging carceral expansion on traditional lands
Build dual-power institutions that demonstrate community can provide genuine safety
The alliance between Iowa Quaker Jeff Kisling and Plains Cree/Saulteaux activist Sikowis Nobiss demonstrates what solidarity looks like when it moves from conviction to embodied, costly, accountable practice. Click each event to reveal the principle it demonstrates.
Jeff Kisling turns 18 and refuses to register for the Vietnam War draft — not even as a conscientious objector doing alternative service, which he understood as a way to co-opt opposition while keeping you inside the system's logic. His mentor Don Laughlin had been imprisoned for the same witness.
Sikowis Nobiss speaks at the IYM(C) annual session, themed "Building Bridges." The first documented public meeting between Nobiss and this Quaker community. Jeff Kisling is present. For many Friends, this is the first time they have sat in direct, face-to-face engagement with an Indigenous leader who offers a full critique — including of Quakers specifically.
An eight-day, 94-mile march along the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) route through Iowa. Kisling and Nobiss, along with a mixed group of Native and non-Native activists, share the road, meals, stories, and hardship. The constant intimate conversation across cultural difference breaks down barriers no workshop could dissolve. Kisling documents the journey on firstnationfarmer.com. Fellow marcher Donnielle Wanatee: "We are a tribe."
Kisling consistently attends and documents GPAS events — not as organizer or spokesperson, but as participant and chronicler. He uses his personal blog to amplify Nobiss's message to non-Native audiences, always crediting GPAS as the architects. He creates the LANDBACK Friends website at Nobiss's explicit request — not on his own initiative.
Following the discovery of unmarked graves at residential schools in Canada — including at the George Gordon First Nation, Nobiss's home community — Nobiss approaches the IYM(C) Peace & Social Concerns Committee. Due to "years of Friends' relationships with Sikowis Nobiss," the committee donates its entire annual budget — $1,100 — to support screenings of "They Found Us," a documentary about children's remains found at her First Nation's residential school.
A 1.2-acre, Indigenous-led project in Iowa City — a living demonstration of Indigenous Futurism. Not a social service program, but a material act of world-building, with Traditional Ecological Knowledge at its heart. Iowa is the most biologically colonized state in the country. This hub is a direct response.
Biskaabiiyang (Returning to Ourselves): This Anishinaabemowin concept describes the process of identifying and shedding the psychological and emotional burdens of colonization in order to recover ancestral ways of being and knowing. The Hub is a physical space designed to facilitate this process — not backward-looking, but rooted in a living, forward-facing ancestral knowledge that is the most sophisticated science available for our 21st century crises.
Main community space for education, training, mutual aid networking, and partnerships with Indigenous communities removed from the area.
The heart of the hub. TEK-based food sovereignty education, land stewardship, and mutual aid through food production. Long-term vision: a community co-operative.
Dedicated space for a BIPOC Healing Collective addressing intergenerational trauma. Healing justice as a political strategy for collective liberation.
Five incubator spaces for early-stage entrepreneurs developing ideas aligned with decolonial values and a regenerative economy.
Pay-what-you-can model, Indigenous coffee roaster partner, community fund, volunteer exchange, and social justice education — decolonial economics in everyday practice.
The DRN is a collective of non-Native individuals, communities, and organizations in Iowa and across the Midwest who strive to be good accomplices to Indigenous people through actively working to repair the harms of colonization. Open to anyone across the country.
The DRN acknowledges that the dominant white culture bears the primary responsibility for colonial harm and that white people bear a particular responsibility to repair it — while welcoming non-Native People of Color and committing to listen to Indigenous leadership. The work of repair heals not only Indigenous peoples and land, but settlers ourselves.
The DRN's primary mechanism for material accountability — a voluntary Land Tax through which non-Native settlers contribute ongoing financial support to GPAS's ReMatriation Fund. A community that makes a financial commitment — ongoing, automatic — has moved from good intentions to active objection.
Monthly calls: First Wednesday · 7–8 PM CT · decolonialrepairnetwork.blog
The SPICES testimonies contain powerful, if sometimes latent, resources for decolonial work. The call is not to add decolonization onto existing practices — but to ask whether the testimonies are being authentically lived, and to let honest answers generate movement.
Simplicity — Release from extractive consumption and accumulation
Peace — Cannot be held authentically while occupying land seized through genocidal violence
Integrity — Requires honest reckoning with the gap between what we profess and what we do
Equality — "That of God in every person" stands in direct opposition to dehumanization
In the Quaker tradition, queries are questions held in community for discernment — not to be answered quickly, but held with honesty. Click each category to open the queries.
Members of the Decolonial Repair Network commit to ongoing, holistic action — not a one-time event, but a continuing practice across all dimensions of life.
Ongoing contributions to the Honor Native Land Fund → GPAS ReMatriation Fund. A voluntary land tax that moves solidarity from testimonial to material.
Monthly learning calls, first Wednesday, 7–8 PM CT — focused on Indigenous and colonial history, current issues, and guest speakers (both Native and non-Native).
Confronting racism in all its forms — mascots, cultural appropriation, legal and cultural systems of white supremacy — wherever we encounter them.
Inner transformation and healing the wounds of colonialism within ourselves — understanding that the work of repair includes our own healing.
Healing land in whatever places we inhabit — participating in land restoration, supporting TEK-based stewardship, and reducing extractive practices.
Showing up — physically, financially, publicly — when Indigenous leaders call for solidarity and support. Being present through the long, unglamorous work.
"The standard is their liberation, not our comfort."
"Let our lives speak."