
The title of this talk borrows from Kim TallBear, borrowing from Nick Estes. “In order to sustain good relations among all the beings that inhabit these lands,” writes TallBear, “we must undercut settler (property) relations. Instead of killing the Indian to save the man, we must turn the ontological table. The twenty-first-century mantra must be to kill the settler and save us all. Or as my… Lakota relative Nick Estes put it…, we must commit ‘settler ontocide’.” What exactly might settler ontocide entail, and how would it differ from the settler fantasy of becoming indigenous, which is now being widely circulated as perhaps the only viable response to the Anthropocene? In an effort to answer these questions, I look to the archaeology of a 1960s hippie commune in northern New Mexico, a time and place where American culture was awakening to the ecological impacts of industrial modernity and experimenting with utopian forms of anti-capitalism, ungenerously characterized as “playing Indian.” What might the crumbling remains of these countercultural experiments have to offer a critical understanding of our current predicament?