Justine Teba
Last month, Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeehouse hosted the first ever in-person event for Red Media Press, a recently-founded media project from The Red Nation activist group: A conversation between Elena Ortiz (Ohkay Owingeh) and Orien LongKnife (San Carlos Apache), two contributing authors to The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth, the project’s first book published in April.
The Red Deal is a manual for environmental stewardship through anti-capitalism and decolonization, and Ortiz said something at the time that I haven’t stopped thinking about since:
“The ‘founding fathers,’ who established a hetero-patriarchy on beautiful Indigenous land, were so concerned with writing a bill of rights that they forgot to write a bill of responsibilities.”
Such words hit close to home in a town like Santa Fe. Founding the city on the exploitation of Indigenous land, resources and identities turned O’gah Po’geh (the Tewa name for Santa Fe, which roughly translates to White Shell Water Place) into what LongKnife calls “Pueblo Disneyland.”
“Not only are we responsible to each other,” Ortiz said at the talk, “we’re responsible to all living things, and we’re responsible to hand a planet over to our descendants that is livable. The Red Deal is your bill of responsibilities.”
The book itself outlines three primary areas of action: Divest from institutions of oppression—like the prison and military-industrial complex—heal our bodies, heal our planet.
It’s Red Media Press’s first book, and an apt introduction to the over-arching project.
“We hold space for Indigenous writers,” says Justine Teba (Santa Clara, Tesuque and Acoma Pueblos), who works for Red Media Press. “We don’t want to create a movement that’s niche or gate-keepy. We want to create a mainstream thing for people to consume our media en masse.”
These values are evident in The Red Deal, not just in its content, but in its origin story. The book isn’t credited to any single author, but to the entire Red Nation—which, as Teba says, doesn’t even encompass everyone who contributed.
“The Red Deal couldn’t possibly be accredited to any one individual, or to be honest, just The Red Nation,” Teba tells SFR.
Instead, she describes how the Red Nation held a two-day meeting with organizers from across the Southwest and beyond to identify and discuss the most pressing issues The Red Deal hopes to address.
“It’s always been a collective document,” Teba says. “That’s what it means to have revolutionary socialist politics. It’s always about the collective need. It would do [the work] an injustice to name individual people.”
Thus, what began as a shared series of PDF documents was later collated, expanded and deepened into book form. Even now that it’s published, the work isn’t done; the document is expected to change and grow, Teba explains, as an ongoing matter.
“We aspire to be revolutionaries through political praxis—praxis is theory plus action plus reflection,” she says. “In that reflecting stage, you figure out what worked and what didn’t, and plan your next moves accordingly. The Red Deal is a theory. We don’t know what the outcome of the theory is until it’s already been acted on, and that’s when you reflect on how it can be improved.”
She envisions the book evolving further as the theory is refined through action and ideally being republished again and again.
Teba remembers how she came to The Red Nation:
“When Standing Rock happened...I saw [Red Nation organizer] Nick [Estes] talk,” she recalls. “It was the first time I’d heard such an articulate analysis of what was really going on. It wasn’t a liberal trying to explain, it was a revolutionary deconstructing what was happening.”
The Abolish the Entrada movement also galvanized Teba.
“My entire life I had known the contradictions of being Indigenous,” she says. “Having a Catholic family, but not knowing my language; all of New Mexico going to the Santa Fe Fiestas and dressing up as conquistadores but knowing that they were our demise.”
She continues to engage with these contradictions in her work with The Red Nation, which, she says, “was the only organization that through-and-through ever believed in me, that believed in my expertise as an Indigenous woman.”
And this is only the beginning. In the future, Red Media Press plans to publish anything from Indigenous language resources to children’s books. Its organizers also hope to expand their work into visual media, including video. Right now, much of their digital work is in podcasting, including The Red Nation Podcast and Bands of Turtle Island. Teba, meanwhile, says she’s happy to see Red Media Press making a difference in the lives of those close to the movement.
“The other day on Instagram,” she tells SFR, “there was a mom who posted about how her son chose to have The Red Deal read to him before bed. That’s what this all is about—children deserve to hear their own histories told by Indigenous people. All of this has to be done with the intention to hand off a livable world to our descendants.”
Her words echo what LongKnife said at the close of last month’s conversation at Collected Works:
“Our children...will live to see a world that is going to make sure they’re dignified. And the means that they use to reach that world—they will be beautiful, they will be vicious and they will be understood.”
