2001: Today’s Empires, Tomorrow’s Ashes, Propagandhi

By Kirbie Bennett

The Truth Will Set My People Free

Growing up on the reservation, you can’t help but feel haunted by the ashes of empire. 

On the Navajo Nation that can be witnessed in the aftermath of radioactive colonization with abandoned uranium mines and tailing piles left dormant and exposed to the public. My Grandpa David was a uranium miner for the Kerr-McGee Corporation. As a result of that raw exposure, he developed a series of chronic health issues that contributed to his death. By the time I was born, it had been years since he passed away. My mom once told me a story about a moment when Grandpa David was in a coma. It happened the same week Elvis Presley died. My family remembers the white nurses in the Indian hospital walking around mourning the King’s death. A few days later when Grandpa David came out of his coma, he already knew. He told my family he met Elvis in that other realm. 

Not long after that, Grandpa David too would finally take his last breaths. I’ve always felt a haunted connection to Western pop culture, and that family story reaffirms it. I say haunted because while there is so much I adore about Western culture – from film to literature and comic books – it’s rare to feel any sense of recognition as an Indigenous person. This was more so true coming of age in the ‘90s and early 2000s. Oftentimes you just encounter racist mascots and crude stereotypes of Natives from a bygone era: the implication being the invisibility of present day Natives. To be seen in that way as a living dead figure, it truly feels like you’re staring at Death. And the only time you can see yourself on screen is when you turn the power off and stare at the darkness, making out the silhouette of a you that’s trying to come to life. 

That desire to feel recognized is how Propagandhi’s music became so vital to my upbringing. As a rez kid, this group of thrash-punk white dudes from Canada sparked a little revolution in my corner of the reservation. And it all started with their 2001 release, Today’s Empires, Tomorrow’s Ashes. 

I can still feel that shrink-wrapped jewel case gripped tightly in my little clammy hands. The Hastings’ sticker price said $14.99 and 13-year-old me only had $20 dollars to my name. If I went through with the purchase, I’d be short on cash indefinitely. And since there was no way of knowing what the album sounded like until you purchased it, one fear I had was being let down by the music after buying it. The other fear I had was being caught with a CD that had such intense imagery decorating the front and back covers. 

The artwork featured an American flag covering the globe. At this point, there may have been people on street corners around the country selling flags of that size. And I kept re-reading the album title. Today’s Empires, Tomorrow’s Ashes. I kept thinking to myself, “Did this just come out a few days ago?” 

Because a few days before, I spent an entire school day staring at various TV screens, watching smoke bleed from buildings. We didn’t do any school work that day.  The collapsing towers and the darkest plumes of smoke reached into every classroom in my corner of the Navajo Nation. 

Many of my teachers were white and throughout the day the recurring message from them was the same message President Bush would tell the country: “This happened because people hate our freedom.” “We’ll find the terrorists and bomb them.” Even at a young age without much political awareness, those statements were unsatisfying. Maybe that’s an extension of growing up on the reservation where there’s an innate revulsion toward the narrative of the settler state.

But then, there was my 8th grade English teacher. His class arrived at the end of the day. 

Again, there was a bulky TV on a rolling cart. Smoke and flames were on repeat. But, unlike the chest-thumping I witnessed from other adults, there was a distraught expression on his face. “You know what this means, right?” he said as he looked at us, quiet and overwhelmed. “We’re going to war,” he sighed, then shook his head and continued staring at the screen. Now we were all haunted by the ashes of empire.

I held that moment in my mind as I held that CD in my hands. It felt like an eternity of indecision but eventually I went through with purchase. Then my mom and I left the bordertown of Farmington, NM and we made our way back home. 

At this point I was gradually immersing myself in punk rock. Song by song, these seeds of subversion were being planted in my chest. But sometimes I found the thrill of skate-punk to be underwhelming. And as a booklover since birth, half the time I felt there was something lacking in the songwriting. So when I unwrapped that Propagandhi CD and opened up the jewel case and booklet, I smiled at the statement that greeted me: KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. ARM YOURSELF. Also, the booklet was thick which meant there would be reading involved. I was hooked. 

The album starts with “Mate Ka Moris Ukun Rasik An.” At the start of the track, there’s audio of a woman speaking and singing before an audience. But whereas the crowd in the clip seems rudely indifferent to her presence, Propagandhi compel the listener to pay attention to this woman’s story. The song is a biography of Bella Galhos, an East Timorese woman who at a young age experienced unimaginable violence and tragedy under the Western-backed Suharto regime. In the track, there are various layers of meaning to the pummeling anger. As it relays Bella’s harrowing life journey, the song also indicts white privilege and Western imperialism: 

Around the same time that I was riding with no hands, busting windows and getting busy behind the sportsplex, Bella was flinching from the sting of a Depo Proveran “family planning,” her own Pearl Harbour and a holocaust spanning 25 years to the rest of her life. A prison my country underwrote in paradise.

I was up late sitting in my bedroom with headphones on when that last line activated something in me. Because while the song does confront privilege, it’s also about the band reflecting on their own unawareness. While they were off being reckless teenagers, their own government was supporting all the suffering that Bella Galhos experienced, which included forced sterilization at 13 and the threat of rape by the military. In the song, there are indictments happening on multiple levels, and I empathized with every part. I mean, I can’t relate to being a white kid in Manitoba, but I can relate to the care-free chaos of being young. At the same time, due to the trauma of colonization that echoes through reservation life, I’d probably been to more funerals than birthday parties as a child. From learning about Bella’s life at a young age, I felt a haunted connection to her through the terror of imperialism. 

I found myself caught in the syntax of those lyrics. It allowed me to take small steps back to reflect on the actions of the country I was born into. Because the reservation was meant to be a prison, so it was already a living reality for me. More and more I was seeing American flags everywhere and now, as I stayed up late working through this album, I couldn’t help but wonder about the other prisons and graves attached to that flag.  

For Bella Galhos there was much at risk living under the Suharto regime, but she remained involved with the underground activist network. To avoid suspicion, she joined the Indonesian military youth corps, covertly sending a portion of her army salary to the resistance. Over time, she convincingly presented herself to the Indonesian government as an ideal Timorese youth, to the point where she was selected to be a youth representative for East Timor. She was sent to Canada to attend the World Youth program as a propagandist. But she immediately defected upon arrival in Canada and became an outspoken human rights activist.

As it relays Bella’s journey, “Mate Ka Moris Ukun Rasik An” tells a multilayered story exploding with righteous rage. It’s cathartic and cinematic, and only a little over two minutes long. As the song comes to a close, the guitarist and vocalist Chris Hannah whispers the last verse: The truth will set my people free. The line is Biblical and it also speaks to Bella’s unflinching devotion to justice. And I still feel like a 13-year-old rez kid when I hear that line. Because it also reminds me of my Aunt Dorothy. 

When Grandpa David died, he left a hole in the world for my family. And over the years, my grandma, aunts, and uncles began developing health issues that grew severe with age. During the era of uranium mining, it wasn’t uncommon for Native children to play around the uranium tailings near the mining sites. My aunts and uncles were some of those children. In the early ‘90s the Navajo Nation started up a program with the goal of seeking federal compensation for Diné families impacted by radiation. Around this time, Aunt Dorothy was a healthcare worker, but soon joined this new program as a caseworker.

Since it was just my mom raising me as a kid, and since she worked multiple jobs to make ends meet, I spent a lot of time with my aunt. And it was usually in her office. Any time she met with clients, I would go to the conference room and either draw on the whiteboard or read a comic book I’d brought. The significance of Aunt Dorothy’s work was lost on my little kid brain, but a band like Propagandhi provided a visceral language to the injustice she was confronting.

On work days outside the office, Aunt Dorothy would help her clients by driving around the Navajo Nation collecting signatures or finding difficult medical records. Sometimes she would take my Grandma Bessie on those long drives, and I’m sure the spirit of Grandpa with them too. She was seeking truth and justice for our people, which she did until her own health troubles — which were also brought on by uranium exposure — forced her to stop. As much as I adored being with my aunt, it was painful seeing her in her final years. 

In bearing witness to the settler state’s history of exploiting and erasing Indigenous people, I was also witnessing the vanishing of my aunt. And the two go hand in hand. 

In the last year of Aunt Dorothy’s life, my mom and I would often spend weekends with her. More and more the visits turned into house calls, with my mom taking care of her older sister. The weeks when my aunt was in good health, the sun felt brighter. During this time, as a 14-year-old, I started reading Howard Zinn’s, A People’s History of the United States. Much of that reading was done at my aunt’s house. Imprinted in my memory is the smile on her face when she would see me in the living room reading that hefty book. She didn’t know much about Zinn. She was just thrilled that I was excited about history. And sometimes I would share with her what I just learned. Those were some of the last bonding moments I would have with her. 

Discovering Howard Zinn was largely due to Today’s Empires, Tomorrow’s Ashes. Not only did the band recommend the radical historian in the liner notes, they also wrote a sparkly, thrashy two-minute Zinn-inspired song about the history of state repression against liberation movements. The song shares the same name as the album, and it’s an explosion of historical references. The more I studied the music and the message, the more this band became my life. 

The title track threads together various uprisings from working-class white and BIPOC communities, starting from the moment of colonization up to the late ‘90s. There’s a set of lyrics in it that still leave me rattled: 

Sometimes the ties that bind are strange: no justice shines upon the cemetery plots marked Hampton, Weaver or Anna-Mae where Federal Bureaus and Fraternal Orders have cast their shadows; permanent features built into these borders.

Propagandhi’s songwriting demands the complete attention of the listener. More than other punk bands, they compel the listener to think critically and do their own homework and soul searching. The song “Today’s Empires, Tomorrow’s Ashes” embodies those small demands. As a kid all those references went over my head, but I wanted to know more about these stories hidden in the shadows of empire. Howard Zinn’s history book was the Rosetta Stone to the music. 

In those lyrics, I still admire how Black Panther leader Fred Hampton is mentioned in the same breath as American Indian Movement (“AIM”) activist Anna-Mae Aquash. Both individuals were powerful and committed organizers for their respective Black and Native communities. And consequently, and largely due to state surveillance and repression, both were brutally murdered. The Weaver family is also acknowledged in the lyrics. Their white nationalist politics are grotesque, and yet the deadly 1992 standoff that occurred with the FBI at their Ruby Ridge property still speaks to state violence toward anyone disrupting the status quo. 

The violence of the settler state is a recurring topic on the album. Critical attention is given to the FBI’s covert project known as COINTELPRO, which heavily targeted BIPOC activist groups such as the Black Panthers and AIM. The CD copy of Today’s Empires also contained “enhanced CD-ROM content” that featured material expanding on this history of rebellion and repression. 

That “enhanced content” also persuaded me to buy the CD one night. Because in early 2001, my mom bought a computer for us and I was curious to explore these bonus features on it. When my adolescent mind was ready to witness more darkness, I put the disc in and found a few short documentaries. One was about the Black Panther Party. The video was seven minutes long and it was titled, To Disrupt, Discredit and Destroy. It’s actually a condensed version of a longer documentary called Public Enemy, directed by German filmmaker Jens Meurer. To this day, I haven’t seen the entire film, but I can recall every scene in that seven minute clip. Various activists and artists, such as Noam Chomsky and Niles Rodgers, are reflecting on the Panther’s community organizing, as well as the FBI’s efforts at stomping out the movement. And there’s dramatic buildup as the writer Jamal Joseph shares his story about joining the Panthers when he was 15. Rumors were circulating about the deadly militancy of the Panthers and, in his excitement for danger, young Jamal was ready for armed struggle. When Jamal attends a Panther meeting to sign up, the Party leader reaches into his desk drawer. Jamal’s expecting to be handed a gun. But instead the leader hands him a stack of books. Young Jamal responds, “Excuse me, brother. You said you were gonna arm me.” The man replies, “Excuse me, young brother. I just did.”

For a moment there, watching that video as a rez kid, that haunted feeling vanished. I felt seen in a transcendent way. I felt embers of liberation light up within. Jamal and the Panthers were telling me that education by any means necessary is an act of liberation and empowerment. And even though this was all delivered to me by a band of thrash-punk prairie skids from Manitoba, they presented this material with sincerity and respect. And within all the darkness they were addressing, they also emphasized a message of hope found in rebellion. For me, it was empowering to learn more about the deep history of radical Black and Brown movements that Propagandhi acknowledged in their songwriting. That made me take a step back to realize the vital work Aunt Dorothy was doing for our people. 

I never had the chance to thank her for what she devoted her life to. Days before I turned 16, her health drastically declined. That last week with Aunt Dorothy was spent in a hospital room. One afternoon I stepped out for a minute to get some air. But in that one minute, she flat-lined. When I returned, I couldn’t let go of her. For as long as I could, I needed to hold onto the body that held and carried me since infancy. 

I still imagine a world without the shackles and carnage of empire. Because the prevailing order’s desire to plunder the earth stole my grandfather from me. It cut short the life of my aunt. The settler state’s violence is a haunting that I want lifted away from everyone. And Propagandhi’s music has been my soundtrack to this uncompromising struggle for liberation. They are a balled-up fist waving in the air. But sometimes they pause to ask their emergency heart, “How are you doing?” and “Do you think we really stand a chance in this fight?” To that, the heart responds with the words of Mumia Abu-Jamal: Today’s empire is tomorrow’s ashes; to not resist is to acquiesce in your own oppression. The greatest form of sanity that anyone can exercise is to resist that force that is trying to repress, oppress, and fight down the human spirit. 

For the sake of my ancestors, who survived genocide in its many iterations, I can only carry forward that resistance in honor of them. Hope is tethered to every rebellious heartbeat screaming against annihilation. When this empire of death implodes into ashes, we the true believers will rebuild with rainbows and rhizome horizons. Until then, to quote the band in the concluding liner notes, may all your thrash be progressive. 

Kirbie Bennett is a freelance writer, bookworm, music devourer and a member of the Navajo Nation. Durango, Colorado is another place he calls home. With his collaborator-in-crime Jamie Wanzek, Kirbie is currently working on a history podcast called The Magic City Podcast, which explores Durango's history through the lens of race and class. You can follow the journey of this production on Instagram via @magiccitypodcast.