There have been many advocacies of separations in the context of decolonization and landback. Struggles for Native Americans to take ownership of their land in many constants and many points in their resistance fighting and struggles throughout the entire settling period, and into more modernly as well pushing at least along treaty lines. And there have been multiple movements and phases in the Black liberation struggle that have seem plans to secede in a Black nation. The earliest plans saw this Black United States being formed in the South where slavery and the black population was densest. There have been other plans and attempts to formulate and realize Black nationalist countries within the current borders of the contiguous US since there were more migrations and movements of Black populations elsewhere in the US; as well as other movements which sought a more unitary multinational decolonization.

This really comes down to a lot of practical material realities more than an idealist “what we would want.” How the organized forces of populations, of socialists and reaction, of state and federal forces, etc. are arrayed; geography relevant to these forces and their centers of population and operation, what landscapes are rendered uninhabitable due to climate change when these kinds of questions arise as practical issues, basic infrastructure and logistic concerns, etc. Native Americans would probably have a simpler construct to turn into material practical realities due to already having various reservation centers, but these are kept small, dependent, isolated, fragmented, and occupied, and are also proportionally a pretty small percentage of the population compared to forces potentially arrayed against them if it were just them trying to do this.

So it really matters on what communities have been and are more organized. If there are Latino communities organized seriously for communist revolution in the Southwest for instance, and have access to habitable land, routes, food and water supplies, fuel, etc. many nearer Native American groups could align forces with them. But these are all such far off questions as to be pointless fantasies as silly as the right wingers right now to think about in this way. It is much more practical to think on the lines of organizing ones own community, building socialism and rupturing the political contradictions which keep masses separated from revolutionary politics including in ‘parliamentary’ politics as broad masses still believe in it (such as breaking the democrats’ duopoly and causing an upswell in socialist ranks); as well as basic furtherances of specific de-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist points and pressures such as honoring treaties, fighting against gentrification and ghettoization, basic health and infrastructure repairs in poor communities, expropriation of vacant housing, organizing prisoners and working prison abolition, pushing divestment from arms manufacturers and military in communities and in colleges (and pushing the military recruiters out of high schools — fucking psychotic country); agitating against military enlistments and deployments and direct action against militarism and its material capabilities; etc. These kinds of things.

It is much more serious and practical and practicable to be thinking and working along these lines and in years see where it has led rather than making some ‘early case for balkanization’. For many reasons. It is in the present our work is done, contesting with the material living reality as it is. In general, also, Balkanization is more of a historical event and possible outcome of irreconcilable ruptures in society to be accounted for and adapted to and reckoned with more than it is something to be legitimately sought after and built towards from day 1. Especially if you don’t already have supreme reigns of power a separation or balkanization is much more of just an advent of uncontained chaos and incomprehensible many-fronted civil war scenario than it is remotely a goal.

In the abstract one can think of such a phase. In practice, however, he who denies the sharp tasks of to-day in the name of dreams about soft tasks of the future becomes an opportunist. Theoretically it means to fail to base oneself on the developments now going on in real life, to detach oneself from them in the name of dreams.