(AIA Interviews) Matt Hooley - Water, Palestine, and Settler Colonialism (2023)

Ian Anderson: So this is Ian Anderson of the Anti-Imperialist Archive. I'm here on behalf of The East is a Podcast. I'm here with Matt Hooley. I know that you're a professor now at Dartmouth. We actually connected initially while you were teaching at Clemson. I've been there on and off. I actually worked with Rhonda Thomas. We never actually met while I was there, but we're like peripherally aware. Yes.

Matt Hooley: I think I remember maybe hearing your name from Rhonda. Cool.

Ian Anderson: Yeah. Could you give us some background for your work? Yeah, that'd be great.

Matt Hooley: Yeah, for sure. So I work in colonialism studies and environmental humanities. That's kind of a primary convergence, disciplinary convergence for me. Sometimes that's situated more in like environmental humanities. Sometimes that's situated more in indigenous studies. Principally, I guess just I use Indigenous histories, texts, philosophical traditions in order to critique empire. That's always the aim is the critique of empire, whereas I guess there's different versions of Indigenous studies that are more oriented toward anthropology or something like that. That's not what I'm doing. I have a book that's coming out in April from Duke University Press called Against Extraction, Indigenous Modernism in the Twin Cities, which is about tracing a tradition of Ojibwe literary production and also visual art modernism from the mid-19th century to the present that exists in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis, St. Paul. And just in kind of like a basic way, that's just trying to think about how Indigenous cultural production interacts with Discourses of sovereignty, which we often associate with the nation-state formation. Ojibwe people don't have a nation-state formation in the Twin Cities. Twin Cities aren't a nation-state formation in all of West Dakota land. So how do we think about indigenous cultural production layered into those colonial or cosmopolitan political frameworks? That's what the book is asking.

Ian Anderson: You grew up there, right?

Matt Hooley: Yeah. I mean, I grew up going to and from there. My family is all there. And then we moved around a little bit. But that is like the geographic anchor for me.

Ian Anderson: I know that you're also doing a lot of work about Palestine. And so I wanted to like kind of delve into that, try to reconnect that back into like what's going on here in American native lands.

Matt Hooley: book project that I'm working on now that comes after Against Extraction is going to be called Drought, Seeds from a Colonial History. And it's thinking about the cultural history of the political reproduction and distribution of water scarcity that happens both between the US and Palestine. And so each chapter is going to be thinking about how water scarcity is produced and why it's produced in both places. Project really came about because of a visit I took with the Palestinian American Research Center to Palestine with a group of people. And I just started thinking about, I can say more about this. There's a couple of things that the project's interested in showing about contemporary colonialism. And one of them is just to assert that Actually, colonial systems in the so-called U.S. and so-called Israel are actually identical. They're the same. And that poses interesting methodological possibilities for the critiques of colonialism. And it also poses interesting challenges when we're thinking about something like a global indigenous studies, which is something that's very much like what Dartmouth is interested in. And so I was excited to come here for that reason. So that's the basis of it, the basics of it.

Ian Anderson: Are you, Ray, are you looking to get tenure there? Because this is one of those things.

Matt Hooley: So this is, yeah, it's a great question. I am. It's, you know, in some ways, working on this stuff is always a concern. At the same time, I do think that there's a couple ways that I'm approaching it that I hope, anyway, thwarts some of the easy attacks that are made on scholars of Palestine. Let me just say at the outset, I am not an expert. On Palestine, on Palestinian history, I'm not, I wasn't trained in Middle East, North African studies. This is really asking like, how do we approach these colonial histories from the perspective of global indigenous studies? Right, right. So that's one of the ways that like, that I want to, that maybe I'm trying to thwart that kind of like easy firing. And then the other thing is just that one of the central arguments of this book is just that There is no difference between colonial governance in the US and Palestine, let's say Israel, Nothing I'm saying about Israel is separable from what I would say about the United States. I'm really interested in refusing the kind of exceptional approach to Israel-Palestine. I don't. No colonial formation is exceptional. At the same time, and this is just getting ahead of ourselves a little bit, but I do think there's really interesting things to say. How do we insist on the non-exceptionality of colonial formations, but then... can be sensitive to the profound differences that occur in the context of indigeneity in both places, right? So say that US and Israel are the same is very different from saying Palestinians and indigenous folks in the US are the same. They're not, right?

Ian Anderson: Right, right. The colonial imposition is virtually going to act in the same ways. It's going to take the same cues because they are coming from the same place. I mean, it's essentially, and I've said this for ages, it's a forward operating base. All of the same things that they've learned, half the population there is what, like, it's either Russian or it is people who are from here, who have grown up here their entire lives and just moved over.

Matt Hooley: Yeah, even more than... that's like which is very clear and like an important thing this a couple different layers I would I sort of add to that that other this is just kind of stuff that you know that other scholars have already pointed out, but that the construction, the political production of Israel was absolutely in American and British where it came from.

Ian Anderson: Right. That's where you get Balfour and everything else.

Matt Hooley: Absolutely. And it was part of leveraging the U.S. participation in the war. But even more specifically, again, so like one thing I'm trying to do with this project is show even more intricately the identity of these two governance structures. And so that's why this, the history of drought in both places, it's interesting to me because if you look at how water infrastructure projects like liberal progressive water infrastructure projects in the US became made, you know, it's through people like Walter Loudermilk, Elwood Mead. These are people who worked for the Bureau of Reclamation. They're interested in post-Dusk Bowl restoration of agricultural land. These are the people that created the Tennessee Valley Authority. These are the people that made the Hoover Dam. They were also going back and forth to Israel constantly the entire time and advising Israel on water seizure distribution and other infrastructure projects at the same time. So we're not even talking about historical coincidences. When we're talking about water infrastructures, they're made by the same people at the same time.

Ian Anderson: Just to put this back into Clemson, right next to that is Lake Hartwell, Keowee, and every single lake that is built along the savannah, every single one was man-made. It was flooded. The residents were given a time limit to get out, and then whether or not they chose to do so it was going to happen there are houses there are entire swaths of people's livelihoods and homes and towns that are trapped under these lakes and maybe not in you know the greatest condition they've rotted i mean they've been underwater for for decades now but this is something that did not exist until the last 100 years yeah i mean just to say like that is the playbook that we saw

Matt Hooley: that you see unfolding in Clemson in such like a devastating way, right? Because like the indigenous town, like the Cherokee town is literally obscured by water there right is directly comes out of this agricultural liberal project of water and land seizure the hoover dam did the same thing flooding indigenous places right and then is it any surprise to us that we see the idf in this moment flooding the tunnels under gaza with seawater no it's not a surprise it's how colonialism uses water to reproduce itself It's a really important history to try to excavate.

Ian Anderson: Right now, they're in a process of attempting to flood the tunnels. And this is leading effectively to salting the earth. This is putting salt into so many people's homes, the land around them. Then on top of this, we haven't even really gotten into how water access works for Palestinians and how this... changes between, say, the West Bank, Gaza, East... Yeah, so there's a lot to say about this.

Matt Hooley: The last chapter of this book is going to be about desalination, one of the great promises of terraforming Our way out of climate catastrophe is this idea that we're going to be able to desalinate the increasing quantity of ocean water and drink it. This desalination is something that the U.S. and Israel again are working cooperatively on. And they are both the places where the greatest technological advances in desalination are occurring. There are so many drawbacks to desalination, including that this idea of salting the soil is implicit in desalination, like because it produces this brine that has to be dumped. And where it's dumped is in all the places that you would guess it would be dumped, right? Gaza is one of the places that Israel has built a desalination plant. And not only is that brine being dumped in the sea along Gaza where people fish or want to fish, therefore devastating marine ecology there, but it's also just about, as you say, controlling access to fresh water. Desalination becomes the industrial mechanism whereby people get access to water, and that's the only way they get access to water, then it's biopolitical control in the sort of most vulgar way possible. As you say, this is a kind of extension of the water access systems that we see in other places, not just in Palestine, but also in the U.S., where indigenous people cut off from water systems, whether that's like Bedouin people in the Deqab People in the West Bank, people like Diné, Hopi people in the southwest of the U.S. have to get their water trucked in. and like stored in tanks you just said that the uh zionist built a plant in gaza the thing is they they've now bombed that yes right well and of course right in some ways that's the point that's one of the points of of building such a thing and this is this would be again like one of the statements that it's really important to generalize not just to Israel, but this is how colonial environmental governance works in general, which is that it is offered as a technology of reparation or salvation from environmentally difficult conditions. So that it can be withdrawn at any time. Yeah, like, of course, they're going to bomb it, right? Because it's all about control of water access. It's about the production of water scarcity. What I'm calling in this book drought is something that colonial governments need to be able to turn on and off at any time. And, you know, if they have to bomb it, so be it.

Ian Anderson: It can be built later at their own will or whims or anything else. Absolutely. Absolutely. In this moment, this is an act of showing that they have no power.

Matt Hooley: I think one of the lessons here that's really important to me is not just that colonial governments are bad. That's not a particularly interesting payoff for me. That just seems okay, sure. The world's is going to face devastating scarcity of water increasingly going forward in the decades ahead. It's going to be one of the most profound challenges that everybody is facing. In that context, projects like desalination are going to be offered to us as magical ways out of that. These moments where we see the bombing of that plant, or we see Arizona is trying to build a desalination plant that takes water from the Gulf of Mexico and then dumps the brine in the Gulf of Mexico, in Mexico, and that's an Israeli company that's building it. These are going to be offered to us as magical solutions to climate change. In every case, it's never that, and it's always the reproduction of a kind of colonial control. It's like, that's the thing that's really important to me. How do we use these moments to not just confront the finality of the moment, but also to look ahead and be like, guys, this is going to keep happening. As long as we depend on these magical solutions that are never so magical, you know?

Ian Anderson: I lived in the Grand Canyon for half a year. You know. Yeah. You know. It's fascinating because they have these water basins up at the top of the hill. That's where all the water access comes from. It's just fascinating because... You don't have that same application available to the Havasupai townships that are kind of scattered around there leading up to it. These are specially accessed places and things that were created for the use of tourists rather than for the Native people themselves there.

Matt Hooley: Absolutely. One of the devastating things is that infrastructural seizure of water that I'm interested in, like this kind of progressive era thing that happened in the US and Israel and other South Africa and Australia, other places all over the world, is that they not only are about guaranteeing colonial access to water and colonial control over access to water, But they also devastate the natural systems of water storage that indigenous people have been depending on and cultivating and sustaining for millennia. And you must know in the Southwest, deserts hold, they're depicted as dry places. They hold tons of water. They hold water in all of these amazing places. And the problem is when you have things like the Colorado River Compact, which is all about distributing water to like states so they can grow corn and fucking almonds and stuff like that. Those aquifer systems... don't refill. So it's not just about very much like the same thing as salting the soil. It's like not just about ensuring or restricting access to colonial governance structures. It's also about making sure that indigenous water access systems are devastated.

Ian Anderson: The Grand Canyon River has been depleted deeply. This is a river that runs consistently and constantly, right? Yeah. It's sunk maybe what? I couldn't even tell you the eco-friendly ways of touring it. The rafting and kayaking companies use, that's still not going to be enough. because that doesn't impact it in the way that that's what it needs.

Matt Hooley: Yeah, for sure. And another sort of reason to go back to try to historicize these things is to point back to industrial agriculture as being like one of the real principal villains in the story. And it's such a distraction. We are presented with these so-called solutions. like the one that you're referencing like ecotourism right as if that is going to like make a difference one way or the other it's like perfect example of a kind of liberalization of a structural problem is like if you do this if you use your water bottle everything is going to get better no like what we have to do is like reimagine these agricultural systems that were established in the mid-20th century that are using the vast majority of the so-called public water are devastating indigenous hydrological systems that always depended on rivers etc and And that, again, like that's a history that it's literally identical if we're looking in Palestine and Turtle Island, which that's just interesting to me that if I were like a smarter, better scholar, I would also expand and be talking about South Africa, Australia and other places.

Ian Anderson: the Jewish National Fund, right? And then like the way that the national park system works, these are maybe not quite the same, right? Because one is meant to allot land out as a residential thing, but these are still colonial control structures of the land that takes it over from native stewardship and takes that away from them as an access point.

Matt Hooley: And that's actually the chapter I'm writing now is about the role of Park. And the chapter is looking at the Nakab, where the JNF, and interestingly, other people have written about this already, but the famous case of Al-Araqib, which is that Bedouin village has been destroyed 220 times, constantly rebuilt. It's being destroyed to make way, not just for the JNF, but for this forest that's funded by a christian evangelist zionist media company called god tv the village is being destroyed for the plantation of the god tv forest which is is like an onion headline you know but i'm looking at also where i'm telling that story alongside a story of a city park in minneapolis and the through the establishment and the policing of parks. And when I say policing of parks, I mean literal policing. Minneapolis has a park police system. One of the police officers that was involved in murdering George Floyd was a park police officer. And in Israel, there's a police system called the Green Patrol that is one of the... forces that participates in these demolitions of Bedouin villages. But one of the points that I want to make about parks and water, as you say, it's about guarding water access. Absolutely. But it's also about producing a cultural and aesthetic fantasy of a lively nation state. If you're going to produce a colonial nation state, you want it to look green and living, right? You want it to look like it's fertile. And we see this in the writing of early colonial officials in both Israel and in Minneapolis and in Minnesota. They want this kind of fantasy of a green utopia that's going to go on forever. Making the desert bloom. Right.

Ian Anderson: When they came into an area that had people that had people that knew the land, had made the land bloom for decades and generations and hundreds of years prior.

Matt Hooley: Absolutely. And that great irony is that by thinking in a sort of basic hydrological way, the establishment of parks, you know, this kind of green surface on an otherwise brown land, let's say desert or like prairie in the case of Minnesota. making that manufacturing that green surface actually takes away destroys the natural hydrological system because like what water is supposed to do in those places is go through the topsoil down to the aquifer where it's stored where it then feeds plant systems from the bottom when you plant all these plants that hold the water on the topsoil on that top surface it actually makes that place more arid it increases evaporation and it it takes water out of the soil So it's actually like making it drier, but you don't care because like it's, you know, I'm a literary scholar. So like I'm interested in like the cultural investment and like the cultural investments all about like, can we make it look like a lively place, even if it's not, even if we're killing it, I should say, you know.

Ian Anderson: You have the Dead Sea, right? It's currently being used for any number of beauty products, right? This entire sea is being destroyed for the sake of a completely fake concept of Israeli beauty and aesthetic.

Matt Hooley: literally global because it's just capitalism and if the capitalist fantasy of unending reproduction is literally becomes something that we do to our bodies we all know that we're not going to live forever it is a devastating it's a devastating contradiction that you're pointing out that colonial governments and industries are willing to kill ecosystems across the world in order to sell a fantasy of permanent life to people who all know that they it's untrue it's really hard to counter like contradict because like who isn't hailed by a fantasy of permanent life it's very compelling i don't i don't know how much history of the state solutions and various offers that have been made to the palestinian authority to the gazans of what that would constitute for them the two-state solution you

Ian Anderson: You have this really fascinating moment back in like 2000 or so with Ulmer and his infamous napkin deal, which was supposed to give the most generous offer since decades prior of the potential land trades or arrangements. When you draw these kinds of agreements out, leading on from that, and each time it conveniently excludes water access, aquifers, water sources just in general, and you see this play out, I'm sure as well, in the ways that that has affected Native people here.

Matt Hooley: Yes, absolutely. And so in some ways, like the most important thing, one of the defining contradictions of colonial systems all over the world is that they are both dependent on land, like the acquisition and seizure of land. But they also say progressive and liberal versions of this use the most impoverished definitions of what land is when they're making these agreements. When they're drawing agreements, they're making maps of property. But we know that like land is not just that. It's like all these things and it's like the connection to water and all these other things. Go ahead. This is like the kind of beautiful thing in this moment, just to go back to like the way that you began to like frame this like line of thought you're talking about the various like solutions that that's always like such a funny construction, not from you, but like from the world to me that like the way that we think about it. talk about ongoing histories of global war are in terms of solutions, because like, it goes back to the liberal sort of magical thinking around climate change as if there's going to be like a solution to it, like there isn't going to be a solution, there's going to be struggle, right? And, you know, Said is, of course, brilliant on this when he talks about the problem with the construction, the question of one of his books is called The Question of Palestine. He says, like, the problem of one of the problems of that construction is that it implies the questionability, let's say, of Palestinian land claims. The other thing that it does, it suggests that the response to the question is a solution. And that's like this automatically binarizing process. formulation, which is so problematic and is untrue. The question of Palestine became the answer to the Jewish question, right? Which is like this antisemitic European history of white supremacy and violence against Jewish people in Europe. The question didn't produce a solution. It produced another question. It was just a displacement. And so then when you go down to the question of land, as you were just doing, when the question is posed, when these histories are framed in terms of a question and a solution, it lends itself to these stupid and binarizing approaches to something as complex as land, which is how do we boil this down to history? a question of comparable property. Because that's a solution. And that's a transportable, that's an exportable solution that we should all be happy with. And it's like, no, bro, there's no solution. There's only the proliferation, so many different people's relation to land that can never be translated, that could never be drawn on a napkin, that could never be indexed. It's this ongoing...

Ian Anderson: creation of human relationships with land and water that's the way out and so then there's that's not a solution that's just like living like every part of like the two states solution as we see it now is that they want to both divide up west bank and gaza and the city as these three different areas that then have to have different portions traded off and moved around. And meanwhile, we know that that's gone and dead. What that leads to is that these are three different places that are part of a larger ecosystem that have been drawn and quartered into various borders that do not construct Palestine as a larger concept. Even if that two-state solution were to be put in place, you would see the same faltering of stewardship, the same problems crop up, except Palestinians wouldn't even have a say or control in how it happened anymore. They would be put into their parceled little spaces and still experience the same oppression, the same problems as they have before.

Matt Hooley: Yeah, there's no solution to colonially produced conflict anywhere in the world that can be resolved through colonial concepts of property or land. If we're talking about how do Dakota people assert their sovereignty to Minneapolis and St. Paul, it's never only going to be a question of acreage. It has to be a question of water and it has to be a question of air and atmosphere and food and all these things all together. And like the last thing, the least sensible way of framing that is in terms of a national boundary formation. And this is true also if we're thinking about the history of white supremacy in antisemitism and the supposition that a nation-state formation is going to provide security against that. I think that it's been demonstrated that it doesn't. A better way forward would be to look at like extraordinary complexity and scope and expanse of Jewish relationships to land and water and community and kinship all over the world. And that's like the beautiful thing about that and other traditions, right? Is actually it's proliferation. It's like The fact that it happens everywhere in the world in all these different ways, that's such a beautiful and amazing thing. What a stupid and classically British solution to be like, you know what's going to solve this problem? A single nation state here. It's not a solution. So it's really funny that that's how these debates so often get constructed is in terms of solutions. There's no solution. There's a proliferation of living that we have to celebrate and protect for every single person.

Ian Anderson: The Jewish diasporic ties to nation and land and the people around them, right? That has existed in so many different formations for hundreds of years. And for the last 75, 80 years, you see this complete disruption of that. And so especially in terms of academic work, you see this reorienting around Israel and the relationship that that has developed to a kind of fantasy reality. On top of that, instead of a proper academic eye and scholarship around these kinds of different diasporic understandings of the world, it's turned into, again, these things are disrupted. These things are pushed right back into the Zionist framework. There is no shortage of Zionist research of academic work that is all focused on the Zionist project and framing it as such within a colonial fantasy.

Matt Hooley: It's just so obvious to me that The source of this, if we're going to describe it as having a source or having a source that's connected to a religion, is that it's Christian. This is a Christian fantasy of a kind of... It's all about the meaning of the world will be reduced to this particular place and this event. And it's really not comparable or is not compatible with the beauty of Jewish and Muslim and also indigenous world systems that are dispersed in all these different places, are diasporic. And I think that's really important to say at this moment, just because of this sort of heightened focus on the question of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. I'm not really interested in engaging with that particularly, except for just to say that Let's talk about the relationship between avowedly Christian nation states and the production of this devastating moment.

Ian Anderson: We have a genocide that is currently being led by the world's most powerful imperialist structure that can't maintain or win a single war for the last 20 odd years or more. I mean, since Vietnam, the Korean War still hasn't technically ended. These are all things that have represented effectively failures of its own contradictions and the weight of everything that it has wanted to do. We have an ongoing genocide that at the drop of a hat, Biden could say one single word and it would end. And you know it would. You look at what's going on. What went on, sorry, in Yemen, there were articles written about how any general, any president at that time, of which there were two, could simply say the word and the Saudis would simply drop everything. and let it go. And there was this massive military investment in the genocide and destruction of many people. And now you look at this and they are the strongest supporters of the Palestinians. And this is just it. They're building navy from scratch. Yeah, and what that's now turned into is they have a permanent sanctions waged against the Zionists, and it's effective because they have one of the strongest naval positions in the region, despite being literally a tiny, tiny country.

Matt Hooley: The U.S. is responsible for so many ongoing genocides. The colonial occupation of Turtle Island... is an ongoing genocidal campaign against thousands of tribal communities in the so-called US. There has never been, there is no solution to that history. And this is the problem of colonial governance. And just to be like crystal clear here, like when we're talking about opposition to colonialism, anti-colonialism or anti-imperialism as your podcast is called, right? We're not, this isn't about sending settlers anywhere. This is about the question of how do we reimagine colonialism?

Ian Anderson: A better world.

Matt Hooley: Yeah, governance structures in the world. We're talking about political formations here. It's objectively true about, historically true about the history of colonial formations is that they depend on reproducing and proliferating ongoing destruction and ruin. It shouldn't really be a surprise to anybody when we see it again and again. I hope, as the brilliant Marion Cabas has let this radicalize you, I hope that these moments can be useful to people to examine the colonial systems many people in the world are a part of. Our response to seeing the devastations in Gaza should also be about who are we also? What are the devastations that are occurring where we live? When you brought up Clemson, right? This is a perfect example. That's an ongoing genocidal project. That's not over. There's nothing over about that. That's ongoing.

Ian Anderson: It's also to say that many of the residents, like the native people that were in upstate South Carolina, that were in all of these places, right? Some of them may not live in these same places. That doesn't really change much. What it does mean is these places are not bereft of their history, their culture. It's that it's simply been displaced into some place that they may have never lived. grown up or been for for the longest time and so this is what like you see with a lot of like the camp formation in palestine and i'd love if if you could just like give us some more like detail about that and like like what all you saw because we we haven't even really gotten into that yet when when you went to visit but this is where you get like so many of these places are called camps these are places that have houses like fully formed structures that are permanent they still don't think of these places as as their own as fully formed townships because they aren't these are not their homes these are not where their families are from this is not where they grew up or where their children should grow up in in a more real sense

Matt Hooley: The history of indigenous relocation is absolutely intrinsic to colonial history. And relocation does two things. I have a chapter in my book that's coming out in April about relocation. Relocation does two things. One is that it produces dispossession, fantasies of terra nullius and empty land that can be occupied, you know, like the famous slogan of people

Ian Anderson: A land for people, for people without a land or something, basically taken from the Manifest Destiny playbook of the United States.

Matt Hooley: So relocation does that. It produces a fiction of emptiness. And it also is used to produce regimes of humanitarianism that are all about preserving indigenous dispossession. right and so this is when we see critiques of calls of ceasefire it's really important it's like what is what is ceasefire you're asking for is it asking for a return to the indigenous dispossession that we are just comfortable with is that again relocation is posited as a solution to a colonial question and then what you're saying and what i'm saying and what indigenous people say all over the world is that it isn't a solution it's the deferent the deferral of dispossession and it's also something that indigenous people are relentlessly going to oppose and try to restore and all over the world they are doing this

Ian Anderson: If you've seen the videos, there are some videos that have come out of the south of Gaza of Israeli troops trying to escort Palestinians through the Rafah crossing. It's just this very surreal moment of you're getting exactly what you want. These are people who will likely, as long as the colonial imposition is in place, they'll never be able to come back. And at the same time, once those came out, I also saw these huge notices from the Palestinians who were still there, of which there are many, many, many, saying that that is not a representative of what's fully going on and that that should not be taken as a cue for more Palestinians to leave. No. You brought up the Palestine Research Center?

Matt Hooley: Yeah, the trip I took there, yeah.

Ian Anderson: Yeah. Could you say more about that? What all you saw? Where did you go?

Matt Hooley: Really important organization, and I don't want to be too specific about it. No, no, you're fine. In part to protect it. Just to say that there are a variety. The brilliant scholar Jenny Kelly has a new book on what she calls solidarity tourism. This would be a version of that. And there are a variety of really important ways that people, students, community members, scholars... can participate in solidarity tourism. And I would also encourage people to buy that book and to think about both political potential and also the challenges and problems of solidarity tourism. Doing things like that is just like, it creates opportunities for these just like really deeply motivating moments a really basic one for me and like maybe it's like embarrassing because it's just so simple and people have already written about it so many times you go to a camp of people who have been displaced from let's say jaffa for 75 years they get water from the israeli water company delivered let's say at best once every two weeks maybe more often once every month that are stored in tanks, water tanks on the top of buildings. And you think, okay, wow, that's a really precarious condition of water access, right? And then you see the bullet holes in the bottom of the tanks that settlers and others create by shooting into the water tanks. No matter whether the government condemns the settlers or not for doing that, that happens. A moment like that for me is It's just something that like I return to again and again when I'm like trying to do this work. And there's just so much. And then you also the patches that people make on the water tanks. And there's so much even more just like in those patches. There is not an intrinsic good or bad to doing that kind of travel. But I do think it's important for people to find some way to understand their personal connection there. to these political histories. Literally every single person is personally connected to these. And it's just so hard to transform that into an image or an idea or a word or a song or something that you can carry with you. And so for me, being able to go there was about creating something that i could take with me and use to help structure my my own work for other people it's going to be something else the most important thing is just colonial systems because they're global systems always seem like they're happening elsewhere but they're always happening right here

Ian Anderson: here at least more closely you get a lot of organizational work to send people to cuba on a fairly regular basis and that's that's a lot closer that's also going to be more closely coordinated with the cuban communist party with the people there whereas i feel like a lot of solidarity work with Palestine, bringing people to Palestine and bringing them into Gaza and things of that nature is a lot more difficult because of the colonial imposition. Whereas one, you are trying to show the nature of the Zionists, right? And in the other, you're simply showing the Cubans are alive and that they're real and that they're people. Yeah. You aren't having to make a case for one's humanity. Now, obviously, maybe you are. Maybe this is, I won't say that is not the case for Palestine, because right now, at least in the States, there's so much of a work to be done to show that Palestinians are human and deserving of the same humanity that is constantly and always extended to Zionists and their lackeys and the various institutions that they've been able to work out of.

Matt Hooley: You know, I just think that contra the passive centrist talking point, Palestine, Israel is like too complicated. It's not. It's quite simple. And we think about it within histories of colonialism. It's reproduction of militarism and death is not complicated. It's very simple. What?

Ian Anderson: No.

Matt Hooley: is not simple is the work of continuing to create frameworks and organizing structures to insist on each other's humanity. That's so different from like an all lives matter thing like that's not what I'm saying. The difficulty with that formulation of the question and the solution, the work of protecting and insisting on each other's humanity is not something that ever has a solution. It's just like ongoing. However the fuck you get there, do it. You know, like, and if that means like doing solidarity tourism, do it. If that means organizing with people in your city, do it.

Ian Anderson: Have you done any work with the ways that like Palestinians have like access to the sea? Because I feel like that is also that we haven't quite like touched on yet.

Matt Hooley: That will be the last chapter. But let me just say that I'm really interested in the connection between that history, let's say in Gaza. And the histories that are also like this is coincident with desalination projects, but the histories of indigenous access to the sea in Southern California and Mexico. I was at UCLA for a year at the American Indian Studies Center there. And it was just amazing to read about Tangva and Taktavian relationships to the sea. And Mishana Goman talks a little bit about this. Thinking about the sea as land is just like a really beautiful and powerful formulation. That's going to be the starting point for me to think about the connection between those two places. And I'm interested to read more and learn more.

Ian Anderson: Did you get into that more with the research in Minneapolis? Because there's four huge lakes that are right next to you. So I figured that's a pretty tangential...

Matt Hooley: There's a couple different ways that I was thinking about that with Minneapolis. One of them has to do with the Mississippi River. There's a convergence between the Minnesota River, what's called the Minnesota by white people, called the Minnesota and the Mississippi River that marks the place that Minneapolis was made. And there's a fort there called Fort Snelling that was actually mandated to be situated there by none other than your dear friend, John C. Calhoun.

Ian Anderson: I know he's not your dear friend.

Matt Hooley: But it's a weird Clemson connection that Calhoun actually was one who asked for the establishment of Fort Snelling, which is like the fort that literally overlooks this convergence, which is itself what Dakota people call the Bedote or the It's like the center of the world. The Bedore is literally like an island in the middle of this river formation. And the situation of the fort there was about reducing, it was about like controlling that place, of course, but it's also about reducing ecological and ontological meaning of the incredibly beautiful and complex relationship between water and land. that is encoded in that Dakota formulation of Bedote to the river. And the river in a colonial construction is like what? It's like a system of transit. It's the thing that you produce, that you sell things down. and pass things up, right? The river is the way that Dred Scott, the enslaved person who was held at Fort Snelling, who is the plaintiff in that famous case, it was like the passageway between supposedly free and unfree land. This is what the river means in the colonial formation. And all of those things are about, to me, constricting the more complex and beautiful relationship between water and land that Indigenous people sustain. I think You're right to say like Minneapolis, there isn't a sea there, but it's a particularly interesting place to think about competing constructions of water and land that are probably necessary to colonial governance everywhere, I would say.

Ian Anderson: You see how this affects Palestinians in that one of the more, obviously, from the river to the sea, right, is how they construct an idea of the land itself. From Jordan, this is something that is controversial to Zionists because everything is controversial to Zionists, right? But not to say that it is. This is the most simplistic idea of a land structure.

Matt Hooley: Let's just take the comparison, think about the comparison between the situation of Fort Snelling in that place and the supposed controversy around that slogan. One people, Indigenous people asserting a sovereign relation by way of water is somehow so threatening that it has to be answered with the most profound defensive formulation possible. So like in Fort Snelling, it's Dakota people saying, we think of ourselves in relationship to this water and land, prompted the U.S. to build a literal military fort and then to transform that place into a concentration camp where they held Dakota people in 1862. There's nothing more threatening than these simple expressions of relationship. I do think that is a really important thing to be thinking about in this moment. And there's that beautiful first chapter of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's book, The Undercommons, Politics Surrounded, which talks about this exact relationship where colonial, social, and political formations are defensive relationships. as a way of trying to establish themselves as political realities. Yeah, it's really sad to see it not only turned against Palestinians, but also against as a way of fracturing solidarity around the world. And to make it so that when I'm talking to you in a podcast, I'm obviously avoiding stating it myself, right, as a way of defending myself. And it's like, that sucks. But here we are.

Ian Anderson: Free speech in this country is a head fake because it has never existed. It's never been a fully formed concept because it was never something that was meant to simply give you a free reign upon which you have a stature.

Matt Hooley: No, it's not real. It's not real. And the only thing that we have is there's no political guarantee. There's no solution. There's no right to free speech here or anywhere. But we can protect each other, you know, and we can protect each other when we're talking about this stuff and protect our students. That matters. And also just to strive to insist on being precise. What I want to say instead, indigenous relationships to land and water matter and they're real. That's in some ways the most precise. That's more precise.

Ian Anderson: And it's like more, more global, more, more within your, your field. The Diné have to drive two to four hours just to get water. And this is something that they have to deal with on a regular basis for a few days of water's access just to have it there. This is because both of like where they were placed and if it had been worse, right? There's no telling. They're not on Route 66. So this is something that they have to then come back to. to access Flagstaff, to access ABQ. These are places that they have to go back to for water access or if there's something closer that still has to happen.

Matt Hooley: The reason for that constrained water access is the production of colonial water infrastructures, as we've already talked about. And the thing that I'm afraid of is that the future intensification of water scarcity around the world is going to mean a doubling down on those water infrastructures. Like they're going to say, oh, well, we can extend those water infrastructures into Dineta to save people from water scarcity. That is such a dead end. What needs to be done is the restoration of that hydrological system, and that means rethinking the governance of the Colorado River entirely.

Ian Anderson: I don't necessarily think that's even the case. Well, you are on to part of it, right? But we still have... Native people forced into these small areas, the Rez, right? Which is strikingly similar to the way that Palestinians have been corralled into Gaza, into the small cities and towns.

Matt Hooley: West Bank, Bedouin towns, and then Aqab. Yeah.

Ian Anderson: And these are formations of a limited space that does not have to be. There are so many land access and land control can be ceded back. What exactly happens isn't really my concern. They're going to know what to do with it or at least can figure it out in their own time. And I'm not too concerned about that.

Matt Hooley: You're talking about decolonization and the fear that is always raised by settlers that decolonization is going to mean their eviction or destruction or their own... And you're right to say that those are just inverted fantasies of their own political worlds. And if we actually care about the future of the world, empowering indigenous land access, modes of government, modes of... ecological curation and sustainability are obviously the things that need to be supported and invested in, prioritized, obviously.

Ian Anderson: This has been great. I'm glad to have you on. Could you tell us a little more about where we could find you, if there's any projects? Because you mentioned the book that's from Duke Press, right?

Matt Hooley: Can I send you a text in this thing?

Ian Anderson: Yeah, yeah.

Matt Hooley: Awesome. And I'll email you a little thing about where i work but it'd be great to like have people know about the book so it's been yeah it's been great talking with you and thanks for doing this work i'm sure that you are someone who feels vulnerable by the by the political moment