Making Freedom in Forgotten Places
I’ve been wearing the yellow-and-black checkered Dechinta flannel that you gave me in January like a hug. When I first wrote to you, I could not possibly have foreseen this moment: the stay-at-home orders, the closures of schools, daycares, workplaces, the empty streets, and the packed emergency rooms. Though we had already committed to be in relation and communion, to engage with how to build life amidst the already-underway crises of our times, I’d not imagined we would be contending with such an immediate and dramatic up-ending of the lives we’d grown accustomed to.
A few weeks back I was folding my son’s clothes and texting with you, feeling overwhelmed by the demands of parenting, rapid-response organizing, chronic pain, yet glued to the CBC News App and its minute-by-minute tracking of rising hospitalization rates. We were mostly just checking in. I was pretending to be a tough guy, as I do. You wrote back something vulnerable, though, that reminded me it was okay for us to feel momentarily shattered at a time when the world we have come to know is shattering.
I’ve been worried about you, too. I know you’ve lost Elders and likely fear losing more. I feared this for you as soon as the age vulnerabilities of the virus were announced. I know, from a deep understanding of this country’s history, that those you have valued and learned from most may fall subject to the tyrannical abandonment that comes from being evacuated, continuously, from the conception of the “public” whose health is being prioritized and protected during this pandemic.
We have just lived through—are still living through—a moment in which one catastrophe enfolded into another. Because, of course, the crisis that is this pandemic is by no means separate from the ecological crisis. It’s not that we weren’t warned: as so many scientists have noted, a shifting climate made another pandemic nearly inevitable. A 2010 study in Global Warming described how climate change facilitates the conditions for a new and possibly deadly pandemic: how the thawing ice, changing bird and animal migration patterns, and a travel-based world of constant human migration create ideal conditions for the spreading of viruses new to humans. The study’s authors posited that “climate change and globalization” could create the next pandemic, adding that “[a]s the climate becomes more unstable, its role increases,” leading to multiple ways to increase risks of pandemic illnesses. This is not to say that pandemics are new to this time, or that they are solely created by a heating planet and capitalism. But these factors make pandemics far more possible and likely.
So here we are, as scientists predicted and as #Octavia ToldUs. I’m re-reading all of Butler’s works to salvage my imagination through this bleakness. Published in 1994 and 1998, Octavia Butler’s two-part Parable series focuses on an emergent community, led by a young Black woman named Lauren Olamina, working to build lives anew in the wake of total social collapse. The years preceding the collapse are described as “the Pox”—a period of widespread contagious illness, mass death, and scarcity. The society’s reliance on unceasing corporate greed, unrelenting ecological destruction, racism, and ongoing warfare led to “accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises.” In Parable of the Talents, the coinciding crises are described as stemming from North Americans’ “own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas,” stating that “we caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises.” This sounds familiar, of course.
Describing the series, Butler told an interviewer twenty years ago that “there isn’t anything in [these books] that can’t happen if we keep going on as we have been.” In other words, the books were a warning. A warning that went unheeded. In a moment when a world that was already plagued by preventable droughts, famines, and food shortages is now in the midst of a global pandemic that has devastated global south economies, where residents of North American cities face mass evictions as billionaires become trillionaires, the Parable series can only just barely be categorized as science fiction. Butler had an ability to project, with eerie accuracy, the possible futures born of the present. It’s hard not to feel that the text was used as a playbook by the ruling elite: I cannot imagine her reaction had she lived to see the scenes of her novel play out so literally. Because twenty years ago, her narrative described the rise of a demagogic right-wing US president who came to power—in the 2000s—with the slogan “Make America Great Again.” This—while the story’s characters navigate a California landscape ravaged by wildfires, caused by global warming. Because of this, Butler is often described as a prophet, in a semi-mystical fashion. I think it’s more helpful to understand her as highly well-read, and as an uncannily astute political theorist who understood where the logics of racialism and unrelenting extraction of all living things could take us, if they continued uninterrupted. Her texts were based on, in her own words, “the sociological aspects of our future lives.” And Parable was an “If this goes on …” series, bringing to life the long-term consequences of the status quo: increasing corporate control over all aspects of animal and human life; uninterrupted ecological destruction, racism, and labour exploitation rendering so many lives disposable. And it did go on, of course.
So as #OctaviaToldUs, we are facing, today, a climate crisis that is a health crisis that is a crisis of racial capitalism. Living through a pandemic that did not create but reveals the violent hierarchies that define our world’s asymmetrical determinations of access to life—and vulnerability to death.
For what is COVID-19—and the massively uneven exposures to death that have proliferated since it emerged—but a conglomerate of the “coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises” described in Butler’s text?
And here we are.
As you’ve outlined so lucidly, few—if any—crises exist that are untainted by racism, colonialism, Indigenous genocide, and anti-Blackness. Which of course structurally positions our communities on the razor-sharp edges of vulnerability and disposability in the COVID-19 response. And as you’ve also shown, for our communities, this is “[a]nother crisis amongst a multitude of crises, from police and carceral violence to pipelines and global warming to the missing and murdered to opioids.” Exactly!
I’m honoured to have received what you have shared with me. That you have entrusted me with the story of Wabakinine, of your own family’s dispossession from the land—itself mediated by yet another racially stratified “public” health crisis. Reading these words awakened in me the dull throb of anger that lives, most days, in my lower chest cavity—the place where I hold my rage—which at times pulses through my arteries and competes for space with the oxygen and threatens to overtake me if I don’t purposefully direct it outside of myself. This is a throb that is activated each time I turn on the radio and, after fiddling with the dial, learn of another young Black person robbed of their best years, meeting too-soon with a death that was preventable but for this country’s structural and societal abandonment. It is in the family of anger, spanning from dull to acute, that comes from the knowledge that all of this loss is not a bug, or a failure, but part of the design of this place called Canada. Together, the stories you’ve re-told for me so keenly illuminate the sexual, racial, and gendered violence upon which this nation was and is built. The biological and ecological warfare against your peoples serving, in your words, to “eliminat[e] Indigenous peoples through either death or assimilation.” Your grandfather Hartley’s illness and death, the fallout that ensued for the rest of your family, bring to light and to life the direct line that tethers the state brutalities of the past to those of the present.
It’s so essential that we collectively refuse the purposeful absenting of these enduring histories from the public memory, that we refuse to forget the ways in which illness— smallpox, TB, syphilis, now COVID-19, has been allowed— and encouraged, in some cases—to proliferate in those racialized outside of the “public” of public health.
The pandemic is unfolding along the racially delineated lines of the crisis of the past five hundred years. Could we have expected anything less?
Ruth Wilson Gilmore has highlighted the ways in which vulnerabilities of all kinds—to illness, environmental harms, to state captivity—come together in sites that she describes as “forgotten places”: places where peoples who have been abandoned by the state are vulnerable to state captivity and poor health. Places whose demographics are delineated along racial and economic logics established long ago.
And I have been thinking, as I wrestle with your letter, about the forgotten places of the COVID-19 crisis. The high rates of infection in places like homeless and refugee shelters, of Black neighborhoods in the west end of Toronto, of Montréal Nord, home to a large and economically disenfranchised Haitian population (though it stands to note they are not, not ever, forgotten by the police). You’ve highlighted others: Oppenheimer Park, the Downtown Eastside, northern Indigenous communities.
“Forgotten places,” as a descriptor, makes sense of how and why, despite Canadian public-relations clichés that “we are all in this together,” some peoples—our peoples—have been abandoned altogether.
A friend of mine, Zoë Dodd, a long-time outreach worker and advocate for street-involved and drug-using communities, texted me recently. She was asking if I could, if need be, help raise support for the largely Black residents of Moss Park in the likely event that they were to face eviction by the city of Toronto. Black people—who are 30 percent of the homeless population in Toronto—have been, as she describes, the last to be re-housed by the city, and thus represent the majority of the encampment residents at this time. This community of largely poor Black men have been living in tents, or more accurately, in tent-based encampments, a result of the confluence of the housing crisis and the pandemic. Of course, the housing crisis is not new, and dozens of people die preventable deaths here every year; I live in a city where high-rises lie empty, but housing is unaffordable—capital chosen over people time and time again. Yet the contours of the city’s priorities of wealth over human beings have become more sharply visible, an already-deadly calculus that is now all the more acute.
Because as Black residents are facing possible evictions from these makeshift but vibrant homes, the COVID-19 risks in congregate settings, and in the shelter system in Toronto, are well-known. After multiple and constant outbreaks it’s clear to many of the homeless residents of this city that tents are safer; they allow for social distance. Encampment residents have been discerning, have made choices about their own lives and safety, and have selected the best of the limited available options. And they are laying claim to a public space (so-called) in a city that is hostile to Black life, staking out survival in a context where even the very basics of virus prevention have been denied to them. Still, in the face of this industriousness, of this lived and wide-spanning knowledge of how to survive in a context of urban warfare and multiple epidemics, of the sheer force required to maintain community safety despite endemic state neglect, city officials have denied them some of the basics of health protections. The city has not, and apparently will not, turn back on the public water fountains— shut off during the COVID-19 closures—denying both clean drinking water and any possibility for handwashing.
I have just watched a video that Zoë sent me over text, recorded moments before. In this clip, a city official tells the Black men on camera that they will need to leave the premises, letting them know that he will call the police if they don’t leave. The city employee’s voice is tense, high-pitched. He is seemingly exasperated, perhaps simply unable to fathom people’s refusal to leave the community and comparative safety they have fashioned from the wreckage of a failed housing and health response. He nervously cites trespassing and municipal bylaws, the now-routinized avenues of criminalizing poverty, Blackness, Indigeneity.
And yet, the resident in the centre of the frame holds tight. He is not intimidated, he holds his shoulders squared, with pride, he is a pillar of strength and vitality as he responds to the city worker’s outright bureaucratic cruelty, asking: “Am I not a human being or something? Am I not a human being?”
Exactly.
He moves not. One. Inch. He is not leaving. His question, his refusal, exposes the violent racial exclusions of the municipal COVID-19 response, just as his insistence on his own humanity reveals a dignity that cannot be stolen, even when pressed up and against the cruelty of a city policy that negates it.
This video too clearly illuminates that Black people are left out of the city’s nominal commitment to leave no one behind in the COVID-19 response. Or to put it differently, it reveals just who has been decreed “no one.” Reveals who makes up the multitude of no ones who will be and are being left behind every day.
And this is only one of many forgotten places. There are a multitude of Moss Parks, of Oppenheimer Parks, that are less well known, where Black, Indigenous, and other dispossessed peoples are abandoned, yet claiming public spaces, living anyways, insisting on their own health anyways.
This same weary drama is being played out, too, in jails and prisons, which feature centrally among the forgotten places of the COVID-19 response. To date, 600 prisoners and 229 staff have tested positive across forty prisons, at infection rates vastly disproportionate to non-incarcerated peoples (five times greater in provincial jails, and nine times greater in federal facilities). In some institutions, one-third of the prisoner population has tested positive for COVID-19. And perhaps unsurprisingly, this end of the health crisis has been altogether muted within dominant society. Canadian media has hardly reported on the conditions in prisons since COVID-19 began, as compared to long-term care and other congregate settings. We have of course some understanding as to why: the health and well-being of Black and Indigenous communities had already been, for all intents and purposes, abandoned by the state into carceral institutions during pre-pandemic times. For the state’s captives, illness was already prevalent. And little was said, less was done, by the state or the broader public, where prisoners’ lives register hardly at all.
A while back, in the first few weeks of the pandemic, I was in touch with another young Black man incarcerated in a provincial institution. I spoke with him and his family, all of whom were deeply concerned: he and another Black prisoner—very young, an adolescent, just over eighteen and hardly a man—had been transferred, despite the temporary stay on transfers between prisons. In their new location, they had been in lockdown for three days, for twenty-three hours per day.
It’s since been revealed that the lockdowns like these two young people faced are a normal feature of the COVID-19 response, part of the routinized violence that is “health prevention” for those held captive by the state. Even the prison guards have described this—solitary confinement, that is—as torture. The continual use of this practice stands in stark opposition to the other clear possibility. That is: it was always possible to say “Listen, it’s a pandemic—it’s a fucking global pandemic and we never thought we would see something like this, and we are not sure how, as a society, we will be able to survive this. So the time has arrived to empty jails and prisons and let our community members come home, shelter in place, and stay alive, and wait this out with their loved ones.”
It’s still possible now.
But instead, COVID-19 has made it all the more clear that, to paraphrase Angela Y. Davis, prisons exist to disappear from social and political life the people whose very presence otherwise asks us to account for the social, racial, and economic inequities of our societies.
The treatment, under the pandemic, of Black people, Indigenous people, homeless and trans and drug-using and sex-working and poor and migrant people, shows what it means to be rendered expendable. And it exposes quite clearly that we live in a society that is structured around mass expendability.
And amidst all of this, even as cities and nations are nominally “closed down” to flatten the curve, the police still find time to kill us—Chantel Moore and Eishia Hudson and D’Andre Campbell. They are, it appears, not satisfied with letting us die first and fastest, but are committed to accelerating the process.
There is an apparent contradiction when it comes to Black people’s roles in these times. We are not only making up the forgotten places of the response, but are also deemed, somewhat incongruously, “essential.” Without any sense of irony, undocumented Black women are being called the “guardian angels”—in the term of Quebec’s premier, François Legault—of the pandemic. You are correct, Leanne, if you remember that Legault won his election partly due to a campaign that represented the (largely) Black families who had crossed the border in 2016 onward as a threat to the province, the nation, to society as a whole, sparking a manufactured and racist “crisis” over immigration. And you are correct too that now, these same women are working to care for ailing Québécois families in long-term care homes, and the same men are cleaning the medical clinics and taking out the trash. The anges gardiens are falling ill, and dying too, while struggling for the right to stay in the country, because they do not have the right to health care, to sick days. Because they are deemed “illegal” by those whom they are structurally forced to serve. There is an entire book to be written about the re-branding of this subjection and coerced sacrifice as “angelic.” But anyways.
I’ll move forward instead to note that the apparent contradiction in how this nation positions Black peoples is no such thing. Because for Black peoples, expendability does not and has never ruled out our usefulness in a white supremacist society. Anti-Black logics are not challenged by the presumed usefulness of Black people’s labour: our usefulness does not contradict our disposability. This is what it means to exist in the afterlife of the commodity.
M. NourbeSe Philip, in a vigil organized by BLM-TO about Black grief in a time of COVID-19, spoke to the conditions governing Black life in these times. She spoke these words:
Our lives have always mattered for white supremacy, but they have mattered for the wrong reason—for use value, expendable and disposed of once no longer needed.
Exactly.
It is this flexibility, the ease, the interchangeability by which we are positioned and re-positioned, purposed and repurposed for the needs of Canadian society, that actually lays bare the specific logics governing our lives as Black peoples in this nation. Because all at once, we are surplus peoples, abandoned and forgotten in prisons and encampments; we are dangers to society whose calls for support in crises are met with (always legally justified) murder by police. We are the “essential” and disposable workers, we are the “guardian angels” whose deaths from COVID exposure are a tragedy with no author, we are thanked for our structurally mandated “sacrifice.” And all the while, we remain detainable, deportable, killable. Endlessly useful, endlessly unnecessary: this is what it means to be fungible.
I am thinking of you and your loved ones so much right now, as discussions are turning toward “re-opening” the economy. I’m thinking about what this re-opening means for our communities, for our survival. As we speak, the economic impacts of the pandemic are being deemed unacceptable. As a result of this calculation, a certain amount of human loss appears to be requisite to this re-opening. This has been deemed acceptable, though this half never makes the headlines. The re-opening of economies, of course, only exacerbates what is already underway. Because our peoples’ collective exposure to the virus was already present during the period described as lockdown—including the Indigenous communities living near resource extraction camps, pipelines, and other supposed economic essentials. Even before this pandemic, our health, our living spaces, our labours, our bodies, our communities, have continually—as a matter of practice—been sacrificed for the economy. Our ritualized sacrifice has been the engine of economic growth, and its precondition. So it is hard not to fear what, in the hell, “reopening” will bring us.
Perhaps what is more novel is the expansive reach and scope of the sacrifice that is demanded by re-opening economies and going back to work during a pandemic: we may be first to die, but no one is invulnerable to a highly infectious and deadly virus. The level of human sacrifice that our communities have endured for centuries has now been extended, more broadly than ever before, into white working-class and white middle-class families, all of whom, of course, stand to experience the deadly impacts of the virus as all children are slated to be sent back to school and daycare, as restaurants and gyms are slated to re-open.
It’s hard, and by that, I mean it is a labour, not to allow myself to turn to cynicism, as we witness the horror of some white liberals who wonder how the government could do this to them (!!!!), the shock—real, genuine shock—that their lives and their families could be put at risk, as health ministers freely admit that re-opening is occurring not because it is safe to do so, but for economic reasons. Their shock shows an unfamiliarity with history, of the reality that the policies originally crafted to sacrifice our (Black, Indigenous, racialized) respective peoples inevitably boomerang back onto the broader (white) public. (Structural Adjustment, anyone?) I’m dismayed, angry, horrified, at times. But to be surprised requires a level of naïveté, of feigned innocence, that is not possible if one has attended, even briefly, to the lived realities of Black peoples and Indigenous peoples globally.
And yet.
You might think I’m being overly optimistic—I have been accused of this before. But I don’t want to capitulate to cynicism here. Even though I will dip my toes into cynicism now and again, I won’t let myself reside there. Because of course (!) it is difficult not to feel, rightfully, skepticism, irritation, anger with the surprise of the general (i.e. white, middle-class) public, when they realize that the government, like the corporations it works in the service of, does not give a shit about (most of) them, either. Du Bois warned, after all, in 1935—nearly a century ago now—that the privileges of whiteness (the “wages of whiteness”) are most importantly psychological privileges, even as they are undoubtedly lived in a material sense as well. He warned that only precious few, even white, would escape the ravages and violence of an economic system predicated on the exploitation of nearly all of us, if unevenly distributed across racial lines. It is absurd, monstrous, that it has taken a global pandemic of all things to bring this reality to light, and even then, only partially. But still: I am less invested in a critique of the long-standing refusal to see, refusal to know, than I am with what to do with the new possibilities that emerge from this new, illuminated understanding of the true nature of this economy, of this society. Regardless of what it took to get us here. Because I feel, or perhaps I hope, that this is the beginning of a broader reckoning. That perhaps something profound is occurring, being revealed, that despite the efforts of the political ruling classes, few will be able to unsee with any ease. And crucially, I am invested in what it means to turn this surprise, this anger, into protracted and organized struggle toward a different, more livable future that includes all of our survival.
This society is being forced to see, in no uncertain terms, the violently exclusionary ways in which it has constituted the social—the “public”—within public health. These dominant ways of thinking are being undermined, though, and pathways being re-written from the very grounds of the forgotten places. As true as it is that I’ve never witnessed such a cruel mathematic of life and death as the tragedy of Black and Indigenous vulnerability to death under COVID-19, it’s accurate, too, to say that I’ve never seen, in my own lifetime, such strong attunement, across different publics, many for the first time, to the need to collectively craft responses to support and protect one another, and those long abandoned by the state. A society that turns towards, rather than away from its forgotten places stands to produce new ways, too, of understanding “public” and “health.”
In this moment, communities are creating, building from, and experimenting wildly with forms of collective care at an entirely new scale and scope. Forgotten places are not, after all, forgotten by all. And in those places forgotten—abandoned—by the state, people have their own visions for freedom, for their own multiple struggles to make life livable, to strive for a different and more collective way of organizing human life, and of distributing care.
Of course, while there is a newness to the scale and scope of this crisis, the world-making practices we are seeing now are far from novel. In sharing the re-telling of Wabakinine, you have shared, too, how the death-making logics and practices of the settler state were refused, fought, even amidst unbearable loss. The story of Wabakinine, Odawemaan, and the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg who tried to avenge their deaths serves as a reminder both that this society’s logics are murderous, and that we make our own logics all the time. Freedom is continually being forged in and across forgotten places.
I am being transformed by witnessing, in these times, the multiple and often decentralized forms of community and collective care that stand to interrupt age-old patterns determining who is able to live and who is left to die.
I have witnessed and contributed modestly to a network of abolitionists across the country—former prisoners, families with loved ones behind bars—supporting prisoners who are working, with the support of peoples outside, toward their own release in the context of COVID-19. From here we can see, in the demand that we #FreeThemAllForPublicHealth, a call to release prisoners from jails and federal institutions. This is necessarily linked to an insistence that prisons and jails were always-already a public health crisis. And that they need to be abolished. I’ve been moved and inspired by the labour of Free Lands Free Peoples, Indigenous prairie community members coming together to build abolitionist futures, end incarceration, and fight for the return of Indigenous lands. People have been showing up in previously unimaginable ways, in times of enormous difficulty and loss, to bring our people home from sites of captivity. Some of this effort has borne fruit: thousands of those held in provincial jails were released in March, a major, if still woefully incomplete, victory.
Major because the release of thousands of prisoners meant tens of thousands of community members got their loved ones back: no one is an island of one. Family members of incarcerated peoples and their supporters learned together that we can bring people back home into our communities. And that, if this was not already crystal-clear, if people in jail could be released over the span of a few weeks due to health reasons, no one should have been in cages in the first place. The state was warned, too, that we will fight like hell to see that our people are never, ever, taken from us again.
Of course, people pressed to the edges of state and public abandonment consistently show the most courage and take the largest personal risks. It is those who are forging liberation from sites of captivity who model what it is to make liberation a fleshy, lived, concept. I was on a Zoom a few weeks ago with some of the formerly detained Black migrants who had led #HungerStrikeLaval, and feel I there bore witness, truly, to the full social livingness of the Black radical tradition: mutual aid and self-sacrifice for the well-being of the collective. History, here, being made and written from inside of one of Canada’s most infamous migrant prisons.
Immigration detention has always been a scene of anti-Black captivity in North America. Migrant detention centres, like jails and prisons, have proliferated from and with the logics and practices of anti-Blackness. This spans from the hold of the ship to the detention of Black radicals like Claudia Jones at a reformatory in Alderson, West Virginia and C. L. R. James on Ellis Island; the use of Guantanamo Bay to house Haitian asylum seekers in the 1980s; and the long-standing detention of largely Black migrants in Canada. It is one of the disinheritances of North America. And so from their captivity in migrant detention, Black peoples have continually forwarded expansive visions of freedom.
On March 24 of 2020, one week after delivering a handwritten petition signed by dozens of detainees, migrants in the Laval Immigration Holding Centre, largely Black, undertook a six-day hunger strike. (The Canada Border Services Agency callously described this as a “food action.”) With support from those on the outside organized by Montreal’s Solidarity Across Borders, significant pressure was levelled by public health and civil society organizations and medical doctors like Nanky Rai, and detainees began to be slowly released. And by early April, all the hunger strikers, and many, many more state captives had been temporarily freed. They had, by this time, received messages of support from across Canada, including from the Black prisoners who had been part of the Black August prison strike of the year before, who wrote: “Like the hunger strikers, we know the unclean conditions, the impossibility of social distancing, the lack of access to health care, and the health problems already caused by incarceration. These things make prisons dangerous at all times, but especially during a pandemic.” Solidarity across forgotten places.
Over the Zoom, their easy smiles and laughter were incongruent with the hell they had just endured. And the risks. The Lancet has described the possible impacts of hunger strike on the human body as “starvation-induced effects of electrolyte imbalance, vitamin and mineral depletion, infection, hypothermia, and renal failure.” Abdul, Mr. S (these are chosen pseudonyms to protect their identities), and others risked their lives—quite literally—to protest the cruel conditions of holding people captive in close quarters with no ability to social distance in a global pandemic. On strike for their own release, and for the release of all migrant detainees.
By way of contrast, I am hearing reports of white Canadians who are refusing to wear masks, who are vehemently opposed to abiding by the public health measures that would help protect vulnerable peoples from contacting this virus. Refusing a sacrifice so small, a slight physical discomfort, to protect this society’s elders—their elders, too!—its health care workers and its immunocompromised. Simply because they are drunk on this society’s individualism, and do not wish, I suppose, to be inconvenienced for the sake of another, not if it means being “told what to do.”
There are two different visions of freedom at play here. One is the freedom to evade, to deny one’s responsibility to a collective social body; the other forwards a freedom that is relational, holds up freedom as collective safety. As some uphold the “right” to refuse to inconvenience themselves, the hunger strikers have risked their legal status in this country, and their own health, and in doing so have demonstrated for all of us what it means to sacrifice oneself to keep one another safe. I would like to hope, yet of course cannot know, having not been tested, if I would have the strength to show one fraction of this level of courage, should it be asked of me. I do know that this is what grassroots heroism looks like.
I have been trying to talk to my son L. about what I do when I’m busy during parts of the day, now that we are home together. I want him to know me, and I want him to absorb some of the beauty and the loss of this moment we are living through. I tell him that our family, along with families all around the city, the country, and the world, are working to get people out of detention, out of jail and prison, working to make sure people get out of cages and get to be home safe with their families. I’m teaching him that we’re fighting the bad guys, that it is kind of like being a superhero in the shows he watches, except in real life there are hundreds of thousands of us—millions of us, maybe— and that we are ordinary.
L., too, loves to run. He and Minowe would get along, I think, at least on this front, despite the age difference. He has loved to run since he was able to walk—insisting on it well before he was physically capable. He was floppy, clumsy, constantly falling, covered in bruises, but he insisted, he could not be stopped (this remains a facet of his personality that I deeply admire even as it makes parenting a challenge). He now says he loves running so much because it makes him feel free. Because of that I—I who had always hated—hated—running, do it too. I join him and we run together, every day, as our allotted exercise break from the stay-at-home orders. I know we, Black mom and kid, are not living in a world in which Black freedom can be easily actualized. Because of this he needs to feel something that resonates with him as a space of freedom inside himself. He needs to smell and taste what liberation could be like: I want him to know it, to feel it in his body, to revel in it, so that one day when we truly experience it, he will recognize it and know he has come home.
It’s already July and I’m writing to you today on the thirtieth anniversary of uprising and resistance at Kanehsatà:ke, commonly known as the “Oka Crisis.” This of course was a resistance mobilized by the Kanien’kehá:ka people to protect their land and community, which consisted of sacred pines and burial grounds, from the expansion of a nine-hole golf course and the construction of condominiums. Canada’s response was a violent show of force—first by the Sûreté du Québec (SQ), Quebec’s provincial police force, then by the RCMP, who were replaced a week later by the Canadian army.
Ten years ago, my family and I were invited by Ellen Gabriel to attend the twenty-year commemoration of the “Oka Crisis” in Kanehsatà:ke. I was there in part to launch This Is an Honour Song: Twenty Years Since the Blockade— a collection of narratives, poetry, and analysis I co-edited, from writers outside of the Kanien’kehá:ka communities involved, in celebration of the positive impacts the resistance had on us as individuals and as communities. My family and I walked up the famous hill, past the golf course, to the Pines. It was hot and humid, and not everyone on the route through the white town of Oka was happy to see the procession. I worried for my kids’ safety, as I always do, but I wanted them to be present as part of the legacy of resistance that all Indigenous children are born into. The day before, I had sat in the gymnasium of the École Rotiwennakéhte to witness and hold the words of warriors of every kind as they spoke about the seventy-eight days in the summer of 1990. I learned about pain, sacrifice, persistence, and the trauma those individuals took on and have been forced to carry with them. I learned about unspeakable targeted police violence, never reported in the media.
I also learned that very little has changed. No Kanien’kehá:ka community has control or influence over their territories in the face of ongoing encroachment, environmental degradation, and development of all kinds. I learned that all of the root causes that led to the “Oka Crisis” still exist, and that there is no political will on the part of Canada to talk about our land—apart from terminating our Treaty—or our Aboriginal rights, for these Kanien’kehàka communities or for anyone else. In ten more years, very little has changed.
Standing up, speaking out, and protecting Indigenous lands and bodies is one of the reasons Indigenous peoples exist today. At every point in Canadian history, Indigenous peoples have been articulating this importance with diplomacy. We have been willing to take on personal and collective sacrifice to protect what is important to us, and throughout our colonial relationship with Canada, we have been pushed to put our bodies on the land. And even though we know that our bodies on our land between the white colonizer and his resources will end in police and military violence sanctioned by Canadian law, we do it anyway. This comes from a tremendous, unconditional love of our people and our families, our culture and languages, and the land that sustains us. Yes, it comes from love. We have learned to use our righteous anger and resentment to protect and create Indigenous spaces where our kids can grow up to be the very best kind of people. This makes me proud. Without this kind of deliberate resistance shown by the ones that have come before me, I wouldn’t be here today as a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabekwe. I wouldn’t exist.
Indigenous struggle rarely makes it into the minds of the Canadian mainstream, and when it does surface, it is often without proper historical context. In the recent past, Canadians caught glimpses of this during the 1969 mobilization against Trudeau’s White Paper, and again in the mid-1970s when the Dene successfully voiced their critique of capitalism and industrialization in opposition to the Mackenzie Valley pipeline development, both through the Berger Inquiry and in their brilliant articulation of the Dene Declaration. We saw it at several points in the 1980s, whether it was the Haida-led blockade of Lyell Island, which led to the creation of Gwaii Haanas National Park; the ongoing struggle of the Algonquins of Barriere Lake; or the resistance and subsequent raid at Listuguj over salmon fishing rights preceding the “Oka Crisis.”
But our resistance goes deeper than this. It’s present when we teach our children our languages. When Two-Spirit and queer youth organizers discuss harm reduction with their peers; when the women of the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver organize tirelessly through the decades against the gender violence in their lives. It is present when we shatter the stereotypes Canadians have been taught; it’s present when we speak back to racist comments in coffee shops and racist sports logos.
When I think of the “Oka Crisis” I think of the hundreds of Kanien’kehá:ka women from Kanehsatà:ke, Kahnawà:ke, and Akwesasne and across the country who organized the logistics to support the blockades. I think of the food, the medical supplies, the childcare and the worry. I think of their tremendous spiritual and political influence. I think of the principled leadership Kanien’kehá:ka women showed us from behind the barricades. I think of Ellen Gabriel, and how during the summer of 1990 she taught me about righteous anger, love, and to come at injustice from a place of unapologetic strength.
The summer of 1990, for me and many other people of my age, was the most profound political education of my life. It has influenced my professional, artistic, and activist life in a way I couldn’t have predicted. I learned the value of direct action. I learned the value of articulating our histories, perspectives, and realities in a clear way. I learned what it looks like when Indigenous peoples live and act by using our own political traditions, systems of governance, and values. I learned what principled action looks like. This was never a crisis; it was a radical transformation—and to realize the full potential of that transformation, when Indigenous peoples act with such conviction, we should all listen and ask, What can I give up to promote peace?
Andrea J. Ritchie, in Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, also writes that the Kanien’kehá:ka resistance was her “initial awareness of police violence against women of color on Turtle Island.” Having grown up across the river from Kanehsatà:ke, Ritchie was one of the women who organized to support the blockade by helping to get food and supplies behind army lines, and by joining the camp and acting as a human shield outside of the community. Ritchie writes that these events laid bare for her the continuing violence of colonialism and the role of police and military violence in the maintenance of the settler state, violence that she saw repeated in the recent uprising at Standing Rock.
I know, Robyn, that you are likely too young to remember these events—you will have different actions that you witnessed during your coming of age that changed you. The “Oka Crisis” is transfixed in my mind because this was the first time that events like these were televised over and over again. This was the summer of 1990—before the internet and the nine-hundred-channel universe. It was before cell phones and social media and before everyone had a video camera in their pockets. I knew that this kind of violence existed in the world—it existed in the intimacies of my world—but I had never seen it enacted on Indigenous people five hours down the highway from me, repeatedly on the news. This seems so innocent and naïve in the media-saturated world where we now live.
Two years after the “Oka Crisis,” I witnessed from afar another act of horrific violence and another community uprising against that racialized violence—this was the Los Angeles Police Department’s brutal beating of Rodney King. Ritchie also writes about witnessing this. I remember seeing the righteous anger in mobilizations in the streets when those same police officers, whose trial had been moved to a white suburb known as a popular place of residence for LAPD members, were acquitted. I remember the 1992 protests in Toronto in response to the acquittal of those officers and in response to local police violence in the city—just two days earlier, Raymond Lawrence had been shot and killed by a plainclothes white police officer. All of the events and circumstances that created these two uprisings have been repeated over and over again over the past thirty years. There is a responsibility that comes with witnessing and with truth.
Very little has changed since 1990 and 1991. Very little, except that on the thirtieth anniversary of the Kanehsatà:ke resistance, we are in the midst of a global uprising for Black life, the latest in five hundred years of Black resistance. An uprising and a movement grown from a tremendous, unconditional love of peoples, families, cultures, and places and lands that sustain Black life. Zoé Samudzi and William C. Anderson foreground Indigeneity on the African continent in As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation in their discussion of Black identity and the many ways it is inextricably linked to land. The Twa people around the Great Lakes, Zambia, and western Uganda; the Maasai and Samburu peoples of Kenya and Tanzania; the Nuba people of Sudan; the Khoikhoi (or Khoi) and the San of southern and southeastern Africa; and the Dogon of Mali and Burkina Faso—these are all peoples whose homelands do not conform to the enclosures of nation-states. And, like Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Indigenous peoples in Africa organize and fight the nation-state for their lands, cultures, bodies and minds (their “rights”) through state-sanctioned mechanisms, transnational bodies and international means.
To fully understand the post-Columbus world, I believe one must think through Indigenous genocide in the Americas and in African contexts alongside the commencement of the African transatlantic slave trade. We must also consider the vast bodies of brilliant resistance Black and Indigenous peoples have generated through engaging in centuries of resistance.
I’ve spent nearly all of my adult life articulating in one medium or another the importance of land to the Nishnaabeg. Although three generations of my family were removed from our reserve community, and much of our culture and our language, I have been able to spend the past twenty years living in our fractured and injured homeland, and struggling to learn language, culture, ceremony, and knowledge. There are many, many Nishnaabeg who know more than I do, whose land is more intact than mine, who can think inside our language with ease. There are also many Nishnaabeg who have not had the same opportunities.
Land is so important to me, and to Indigenous peoples, that all of our uprisings and resistances hold land at the centre.
Land is of unquestionable importance to Indigenous peoples and land is of unquestionable importance to Black peoples.
These are different sorts of diaspora. A rootlessness based on common and divergent experiences. In common, our ancestors having lived in and built healthy and sustainable Indigenous societies; diverging, a distinctiveness in history and experience perpetuated by the mass kidnapping and genocidal trafficking of Indigenous peoples from the African continent and the genocide and near-genocide of Indigenous peoples in North America. It echoes the crucial corrective of Robin D. G. Kelley, using Cedric J. Robinson’s work to critique Patrick Wolfe’s Traces of History, in which Wolfe argues that settler colonialism operates through the logics of elimination. This corrective has been useful in my own thinking in understanding the colonizer’s desire to desecrate everything sacred and meaningful to my people— our lands, bodies, families, ethics, governance, and intelligence—primarily because they want land, and Indigenous attachment to land is an impediment. And, as Kelley points out, Wolfe’s assertion that Indigenous peoples were colonized for land, and Black Americans for their labour, is problematic, and has caused harm in our relationships inside and outside of academic thinking. Wolfe erased African Indigeneity through the logics of elimination in the transatlantic slave trade, and did not address settler colonialism as a structure and a process on the African continent. I now think of this every time I see or type “settler colonialism.”
Samudzi and Anderson continue, “Much of the identity production of Black people in the US [and Canada] both from descendants of enslaved Africans (African Americans) and otherwise has stemmed from a yearning: an attempt to reconcile a diasporic self with roots and a sense of African groundedness, a sense of homespace.” Here again, there is both a congruency in yearning, of piecing back together, and also a distinctiveness. My Indigenous ancestors were not part of the transatlantic slave trade and the mass kidnapping and genocidal trafficking that violently severed Black peoples from their homespace. My Indigenous ancestors are part of a different genocide, a severing of self from land, body, mind, spirit, culture, and language that took place and continues to take place in our homespace. Still, I am writing this from my homespace, the homespace of my ancestors. I’m not sure my ancestors would recognize it as home because of the successive world-endings that have taken place over the last four centuries; but, nonetheless, there are fragments. There are glimpses.
I feel homespace most completely in the bush, in a sweat or fasting lodge, surrounded by my closest Nishnaabeg relations. A feeling of homespace is nearly non-existent when I am confronted as an “Indian” on a white, manicured cottage lawn while trying to launch my canoe and harvest wild rice, or when I am arguing with sales clerks in a downtown Toronto shopping mall about status cards and sales tax, or when I am the target of sexualized or physical violence. And there is a grounding from the former experiences of home and place. An ephemeral belonging that inoculates me in some ways from the struggle of later experiences. Sometimes I think that it is those more beautiful Nishnaabeg experiences that have kept me alive.
NourbeSe Philip recently reminded me of this. We had been invited by the brilliant artist scholars Andrea Fatoma and Tania Willard to be in dialogue with each other as part of a Contingencies of Care virtual residency hosted by Graduate Studies at OCAD University, the Toronto Biennial of Art, and BUSH Gallery. At the suggestion of Andrea, we began the dialogue by reading each other’s work; I read an excerpt from the beginning of NourbeSe’s essay entitled “The Ga(s)p.”
We all begin life in water
We all begin life because someone once breathed for us
Until we breathe for ourselves
Someone breathes for us
Everyone has had someone—a woman—breathe for them
Until that first ga(s)p
For air
She ends the essay by quoting, and then responding to, the final words of Eric Garner:
I can’t breathe;
I will breathe for you.
NourbeSe read the beginning section, “Solidification,” from my book Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies. We talked about breath, what it is to breathe for someone else, ideas of care and reaching out to each other; but it was NourbeSe’s first observation that I want to repeat today. NourbeSe had asked me how to pronounce the names of the seven main characters, several of which are in Nishnaabemowin:
I want to speak about my experience with this poem, and I hope I can without crying because so much of it, even though it comes from another reality, another experience, speaks to my own experience. So, if I go to what you just identified when I read “I believe everything these seven say because ice distorts perception, and trust replaces critique, examination and interrogation”—and, even before that, the seven—those seven words. For me when I was repeating the words this morning earlier and then saying them, what it did for me was take me to this place of grief, of not having any other language but English. And while I understand in this corporate, capitalized world, having English is useful—“Akiwenzii is my will …”—and I would think, What word would it be in another, African tongue for me? What is Sabe in my own language?
NourbeSe went on to describe a panel discussion some years ago where one of the participants broke down a non-English word to reveal its deeper meaning. She said she is “at times a little envious that Indigenous peoples can re-learn” our languages very easily.
That stayed with me, because so often I’ve been discouraged and frustrated at how difficult it has been for me to re-learn a tiny bit of my own language and how unfair it is that French is taught in schools, while Indigenous languages are left to die. I have felt ashamed and angry with the violence that all but eliminated Nishnaabemowin in Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg spaces. Still, in spite of the history of linguicide, I still have access to fluent speakers, online dictionaries, and language classes. Those sounds, however rare, still exist in my homespace. And as NourbeSe said in that same exchange, language is “breath linked to sound linked to meaning.”
Language = breath linked to sound linked to meaning.
After the Zoom event ended, and as soon as it was posted on YouTube, I went back to this moment and watched the video over and over. I wanted to spend more time with this moment, and with this equation and with this group of thinkers. I wanted to watch NourbeSe and Andrea’s meticulous and generous engagement with my work, and I wanted to watch their brilliance generate new meaning for me, meaning that extends and travels far beyond my work and my offerings in the panel.
Of course, this is the brilliance of Philip’s book Zong! For those unfamiliar with it, on November 29, 1781, the captain of the Dutch ship Zong ordered the murders of 150 enslaved African people, a massacre by drowning that took place over the next ten days so the ship’s white businessmen could collect insurance money. The legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert documented the colonial discourse that ensued, and provided the text for NourbeSe to build a world in which the urge to make sense of the senseless is refused in favour of “telling a story that must be told by not telling.” This requires the writer and the reader to be “implicated and contaminated by the untelling.” NourbeSe locks herself in the legal text, mirroring in method the way Black people were locked in the holds of the ship. She uses silence and space to draw the reader’s eye into a circus of typography, forcing us to try to order and make sense of something that cannot be made sense of—mimicking what it was like to be an African person aboard that ship. She “whites out, black outs, mutilates and murders the text,” randomly picking them, grammatically forcing them to work together, doing to language what was done to bodies, minds and souls aboard that ship. The result is a book that refuses to be confined by the page. When I stopped reading and listened, I heard a ceremony, “chant, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, sound, mourning.”
On November 30, 2020, Philip presented her annual durational reading of the book, and because of the pandemic, this iteration was both global and virtual. This year’s reading, held over ten days, echoed through the space created by the global uprising of movements for Black life, through a global pandemic disproportionately impacting Black and Indigenous communities, and at a time where many of us are reconsidering the work our writing does in a world preoccupied with Black and Indigenous death. Zong! teaches us to write differently, to think differently, to read differently, and in NourbeSe’s refusal to conform to the foundations of telling, the world of Zong! could not be more relevant.
NourbeSe created a new language out of sound and breath and meaninglessness. She created a new language, new sounds and new meanings out of a legal discourse in English, out of nothing.
Language = breath linked to sound linked to meaning.
After the section of the durational performance of Zong! I attended, I listened to the recordings of Inuksuk Mackay and Tiffany Ayalik’s collaboration, PIQSIQ, and then to Tanya Tagaq’s album Retribution—to hear the language of Inuit women linking breath to sound to land to meaning and creating new frequencies that disintegrate the noise of colonialism. These sound immersions reminded me of this section of poet Natalie Diaz’s “The First Water Is the Body”:
I carry a river. It is who I am: ‘Aha Makav. This is not metaphor.
When A Mojave says, Inyech Aha Makavch ithuum, we are saying our name.
We are telling a story of our existence. The river runs through the middle of my body.
Diaz is ‘Aha Makav and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. The Colorado River runs through the middle of her body. The Great Lakes are my internal organs. = Our existence, our bodies, minds and spirits are of the land, part of the land, from the land, inseparable from the relationships we have to air, water, soil, fire, plants, animals, and spirits. I am umbilically attached to this place. I carry an ethical imperative to live and build in a way that promotes more life—all life.
These listenings lead me to a re-reading of Tiffany King’s work in The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies on Black fungibility, and then of course to the bodies of work by Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, and Sylvia Wynter. These three brilliant theorists made me sink into myself and think more deeply about the ethical imperatives Nishnaabeg Elders have taught me with regards to homelands, space, and the deep sharing that comes with being a part of the land. Ethical imperatives and responsibilities to protect both land and life from exploitation, and to share that same land and life across complexities, violence, and oppressions. The afterlives of transatlantic slavery, current manifestations of anti-Blackness, fungibility and colonialism might complicate these ethics and responsibilities, but it doesn’t mean we abandon them or ignore them. It means they require more presence, more work, more intention, more consideration, and the vision and wisdom of our respective ancestors to move through with grace, and in ways that support a continuous rebirth of Black and Indigenous life and freedom and shared politics and ethical practices responsive to the needs of living beings. Land will always be an important analytic for me and Nishnaabeg thought, although I don’t think of land as enclosed patches of dirt with armed borders around it and I do think my love of my land is compatible with Black liberation. If we engage deeply with these complexities perhaps we can find more than what has been relegated to us by four centuries of white violence.
What if Black and Indigenous relationality refuses settler logics and centres the dismantling in a grounding of the very best practice of Indigenous and Black radical politics? What does it look like if we are all engaged in generating theory, organizing to the specificities of our lived experiences, but we are deeply linked in our distinctive world-building relationalities to ensure the worlds we build do not restrict, enclose or eliminate Black and Indigenous life? What worlds do Indigenous and Black land-based politics give breath to, and how do we connect these to anti-colonial movements outside of North America and beyond? What does it mean to equitably share land, time, space, and the gifts of creation? What does this look like? What does it feel like? Can we make Indigenous and Black futurities against occupation and social death relationally responsive to each other? There is no justice in Land Back if it is not in concert with the destruction of racial capitalism, and if Black people remain landless. There is no justice in Land Back if we are silent with regard to the radical imaginings of Black futures and Black struggles for freedom, just as there is no justice if Black liberation is framed through the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples.
We know that in our respective communities, notions of land and nationhood (outside of the nation-state) can cause tension, and these tensions can and have led to incommensurability. I wonder if thinking through these tensions, of holding these tensions, can also be generative and closen us in terms of our unique and interlocking projects of justice. Similarly, Samudzi and Anderson use both abolition and settler colonialism as lenses through which to think about political affinities between our communities.
Following their example and moving outside of settler logics and dispossession, what could relationally responsive projects of Black and Indigenous liberation look like?
I’ve often used the Dish with One Spoon treaty relationship with the Kanien’kehá:ka on the east side of Lake Ontario and our relationship with the Wendat as examples of political relationships that draw on wisdom of distinctive peoples to create ways of living together that respect separate jurisdictions, sovereignties, and self-determination over a shared territory. I’ve also used examples of Nishnaabeg treaties with the deer and beaver nations as examples. Nishnaabeg nationhood and territoriality, within our political practices, was never exclusive and was never about enclosures. Our homespace was and is shared with a multitude of self-determining plant and animal nations and peoples. Our homespace was always shared, particularly around overlapping places of presence, with other self-determined nations. Our homespace was and is always shared with our ancestors, our children yet to be born, and spiritual beings. A deep and complex relational sharing has always been our foundation of existence, and the way we are able to organize ourselves to live in a way that brings forth more life, more breath. Yet, this seemingly open and endless sharing isn’t naïve or utopian. There isn’t a place in my homespace for capitalism and its evil siblings because of their continual ending of worlds, their continual death march where self-determining beings become resources, property, or are eliminated altogether. It is under these circumstances that the ethical imperative to protect life-generating processes becomes greater than the imperative to share.
There is urgency in this work. The global climate emergency, what Françoise Vergès calls the “Racial Capitalocene,” is the backdrop for all of the other world-ending consequences of conquest. Our relationships to land and place are as always of paramount importance to our collective freedoms and continuity as peoples. Both of our communities live with the consequences of uneven resource distribution, food insecurity leading to chronic colonial-induced health conditions, lack of drinking water, house insecurity, environmental racism with regard to contamination, and the surveillance and removal of black and red bodies from the land when they are a threat to capital.
In many ways, our practices of resistance are already doing this work—when the Freedom School visits Six Nations on a field trip, or in #BLMTOTentCity, or when we come together in the territory of the Yellowknives Dene to share fish and dream of trips to Barbados and the sugar bush. In many ways, there are people in our movements who have always been doing this work—when organizations like the Native Alliance for Red Power (NARP) visited with the Black Panthers Seattle chapter in 1968 to discuss solidarity, for example, or when Black feminists continue to write the Indigenous present into their work and organizing. There are many more contemporary and historic examples of productive relationships of insurgence and co-resistance and there are lots of shortcomings and failings as well. My point here is that this work is not without historical and contemporary precedent, and it is work being done by an assemblage of organizers, intellectuals, activists, artists, cultural workers and people using practice to generate theory from the ground up. My point is that, as Cedric Robinson points out in Black Marxism, the fact that Black people exist today is not a miracle but rather a product of the collective intelligence developed over five centuries of struggle. The same could be said of Indigenous resistance. Perhaps, Robyn, you and I are able to have the particular conversations in this book because so many Black and Indigenous thinkers and doers have already had these conversations or are building practices and thinking together as we are writing this. It strikes me that this collective insurgent intelligentsia and practice of resistance that Indigenous and Black peoples hold, then, is immense and unprecedented.
On Sunday, October 2, 2016, I was invited by a former student of mine to take part in the evening program of the Justice for Abdirahman Community Conference in Ottawa, alongside Yusra Khogali, Hawa Y. Mire and Kim Katrin Milan. The event was a response to the tragic killing of Abdirahman Abdi by Ottawa police on July 24 of the same year, and was an intentional space designed for his family and community to discuss and share knowledge around anti-Blackness, state-sanctioned violence, mental health and xenophobia. This was a diverse Black Muslim–majority space of mourning, prayer, peace, anger and right relations in Algonquin Anishinaabeg territory. It was a glimpse of the potential of Black and Indigenous world-making, even though it may have only lasted a few hours. It felt different. I felt Nishnaabeg and it felt like my homeland, but it also felt like I was an invited visitor and guest in someone else’s homespace, a community that was not mine, but to which I was profoundly linked.
I am reminded of this practice when I think about the #BLMTOTentCity created by queer/trans Black activists in front of Toronto Police Service Headquarters for two weeks in the spring of 2016, in response to the announcement that no charges would be laid against the Toronto police officers involved in the homicide of Andrew Loku.
I remember photos of the encampment community in the media, and I remember seeing a Mohawk Warrior flag and a Haudenosaunee Confederacy flag. This caught my attention. As I learned more about the Tent City, I learned that there was space within the community for Indigenous peoples. I learned that Indigenous activists took on a care-taking role, sharing medicines and smudging practices. I learned that Indigenous activists respected the goals, decision-making and plans for the community.
This community reminded me that when we are intentional and attentive to the settler colonial and white supremacist logics, encampments and other forms of occupation can become rich sites of theory generated through shared practice, reminded us of our potentiality together. Our truths, layered, nuanced and rooted in different historic and contemporary realities, can be an asset when our relationship building, movement building and community building is intentional, attentive and committed to not replicating the logics of capitalism, colonialism and slavery.
Theory generated from land, from practice, from experience, from collective minds and bodies coming together in formation and achieving something synergistic that, as individuals, we couldn’t have achieved otherwise. Theory generated from action propelled by the social conditions and material needs of our peoples. Tent cities and encampment communities as shared homeplaces are microcosms of mutual and treaty relations between Black and Indigenous peoples. Tent cities and encampments build a practical alternative to live in while generating shared Black and Indigenous meaning and theory that could not have been generated otherwise.
White supremacy has a vested interest in keeping Black and Indigenous movements apart and competing. Colonialism benefits from these two genocides. Capitalism benefits. Deepening our relationships with each other in tents, in the bush or on the street, behind barricades and while dismantling barricades, and even through letter writing, opens up endless possibilities for dismantling the white supremacist, colonial and capitalist present in synergy with each other.