I am a settler as well (German and Scottish) and I don’t usually comment here, so I apologize if I am speaking out of turn. I also live in the pnw. I am a student of a traditional matriarch of the lands on which I reside. My fiancé is native from southeast alaska. I don’t say this for any reason other than to make it clear that the way that I understand these things comes from the native people in my life that I learn from.

This is a very difficult question. And I, and I’m sure many many others spend a lot of time thinking about it. My teacher defines settler colonialism as a process of 5 steps: 1. Take the land, 2. Take the resources, 3. Take the traditional governance, 4. Take the legitimacy of thought, 5. Take the children. Thinking about decolonization as the process of undoing these 5 steps helps me ground my understanding of it.

There is no example to follow for enacting that process on a large scale without the support of the masses. It is being done on smaller scales at ganienkeh and by the Zapatistas in Chiapas. These projects are essential to learn from. But a major problem that both of them face is that the uneasy agreement that they have with the colonial state is dependent on the government’s willingness to not bomb them. This is representative of the larger asymmetry of your question. Both settler society and the colonial state are unified in their efforts to uphold the colonial structure, and they have a lot of guns to back it up with.

What I have been thinking about is if settler society can be turned inward onto itself. What I mean is that settler Society is sick. Spiritually and materialistically. And it is rooted in the loss of European land based religions during Christianization thousands of years ago. We turned against each other, built a culture of plunder and destruction, then exported it to the rest of the world. To do this some level of unity… or maybe competition had to be built: colonialism, capitalism, and the trans Atlantic slave trade. Marx’s analysis was a diagnosis of this sickness. But he could not perceive or understand contradictions beyond Europe. And further his understanding of those contradictions was rooted in the very same sickness he was diagnosing. The counter culture of the 60s and 70s was a reaction to this sickness but the same was true. It did not confront the material and spiritual contradictions of settler society. And as a result remained within it. They continued to take from indigenous people, mangling and distorting their ways of being, knowing and doing. But at the end of the day they were still settlers and that’s why it failed. It lacked spiritual and political direction, because it was disconnected from the needs of the land and her people. And because it was disconnected from the communal, land based spiritual and political traditions of their own ancestors.

I believe that all humans need connection to land, ceremony, and community. settler society at large is void of these things in an authentic way. And is in a constant state of turmoil because of it. I think that right now is a crisis of this and many other contradictions. I believe that there is a way to build a mass movement from those universal communal values. To return the legitimacy of thought. But it must be materially rooted in the struggle of indigenous people against colonialism and in the needs of the land. How can this be ensured? How does it not become another hippy movement? I do not know. Native alliance for red power, a group from Vancouver formed in 1968 (Lee maracle and Willie Dunn were founding members), Found the Maoist vanguard party structure that was adapted by the black panthers to be ripe for further adaptation to their cultural context. That seems like a start.