Right Story, Wrong Story: How to Have Fearless Conversations in Hell

by Tyson Yunkaporta

We discovered a significant comorbidity between extreme lawless violence and illegitimacy of the settler state. The more precarious the state in the international context (e.g. regional hostility or isolation, condemnation over lack of treaties and genocidal policies) the more likely it was that extreme lawless violence would occur. This was particularly evident in Israel and Australia, which were the only settler states where we observed firearms being deployed during street fights. We were ashamed to admit we had expected to see firearms mostly in African-American communities, due to our lifelong exposure to American films and television. But we saw no firearms used in these involuntary-settler communities (even when a handgun was visible in a losing fighter’s waistband) and noted our Indigenous cohesion rules were far more likely to be present there than in other US settler communities.