It’s 4:30 a.m. right now. I can never sleep anymore. I’m beginning this letter to you as I’m scrambling, doing some of that behind-the-scenes movement work, love work, that keeps things flowing smoothly. Due to being part of a very high-risk pod, I am not out in front of Station 22, but I’m helping out as a movement auntie, with the logistics of legal and media support, from home. You’re probably aware that in Toronto we are in the midst of a battle on many fronts to defund/dismantle/abolish the police, along with other monuments to racist violence. What this looks like in this exact moment, though, is that many of us are collectively fighting in defence of arrested comrades: numbering Black, queer, and/or disabled folks who’ve been taken into the station for booking, held for what has felt like an eternity. This is, of course, the latest saga in the grossly disproportionate state response to BLM-TO’s artistic disruption of the Ryerson statue, among a few others. The arrests were and are political: the alleged offence involves some pink paint (he honestly looks better than ever), and a sign that reads “Tear down monuments that represent slavery, colonialism and violence.” Yet here we are with what seems likely to be criminal mischief charges. Propelled to action by the ridiculousness of these arrests, railing against the criminalization of dissent in a moment of historic mass Black-led uprisings, hundreds of people have been out on the streets all day and most of the night outside of the cop shop, demanding that the arrestees be let go. And we know how to turn up, of course, Black folks in these times. DJs, speakers, poetry all being a part of the occupation of the public space outside the police station. As it turned out, the arrestees were not all at this station, but had been spread across all corners of the city. For hours we could not find our people, the police were not answering the phones, let alone telling us where they were being held. I have made dozens of calls, so far, to Mike Leitold, a lawyer with the Movement Defence Committee who has been supporting the day’s action. I have dubbed him my New Best Friend, given how much we’ve spoken in the last twelve hours. He has been patient with me as I have continued to call and text him through to 4 a.m. until we’ve known that our arrested comrades are safe, out, freed (albeit constricted by the conditions attached to their criminal charges). As I’m settling down now into writing to you, the last arrestee has just been found, released, safely brought home, and the crowds have dispersed. I’ve been scribbling notes to send your way between calls, between updates, etc. It’s been all too fitting to be sitting, tonight, with your letter printed out on my kitchen table. Thirty years since Oka. Because here we are in the midst of yet another period fraught with militarized police response to dissent, the criminalization of liberation-oriented organizing across North America. On the front lines of a general strike against carceral racial capitalism.
When we were hit with the pandemic and the corresponding shuttering of the day-to-day, I was awestruck by the courage and principled struggle emerging at encampments, behind bars. But I was also mourning, and scared, to be honest, for how this period of quarantine and social and physical distance would impact the foreseeable future of resistance struggle. The possibilities for the public arm of organizing had suddenly been vastly, dramatically constricted, and I worried that we’d reached an indefinite end of the vibrant street culture of resistance that had propelled so many of the recent years of struggle. There were discussions, across many organizing communities that I am part of, about how we could do “public” actions, now that all sense of public had disappeared. Car demonstrations outside of prisons and detention centres, for example, took on a new life, yet I worried at their limited effectiveness. I was happy to contribute to strategy, mobilizing, where and what I could, as this is what the times demanded. But looking back, I realize now how much I was doing so out of habit, and urgency, but lacking the general sense of guarded optimism that usually sits with me. I held on to hope as a discipline, a practice that I’ve learned, along with countless others, from Mariame Kaba, and moved forward out of a sense of principled commitment, rather than giving in to despair. But I see now that I was doing so without my usual underlying belief that somehow we will get to where we need to be; that I was lacking the cautious optimism that normally lives below my sternum. I feared that the months ahead would be nothing but slow announcements of the deaths of our people. I was worried that even though we’d fight—we always do—the fights would be siloed from one another, silenced by dominant society. I worried that all of the emergent struggles to keep one another alive, to keep each other safe, would simply not be enough. And I was afraid that we were losing, losing harder and faster and altogether more than we could bear to lose. It seemed to me that I was a closeted heretic, within movement spaces. Said no—I had to, I felt—to most public speaking invitations, because I knew I could not be what people seemed to want or need me to be, because optimism had gone beyond my purview. I felt sure that my doubts would show through despite the confidence implied by the red lipstick, eyeliner and the “work sweater” that serves as my professional drag.
What I had not anticipated, of course, was the wave of revolt, the massive surge of street-based uprisings, that was to come, that is now upon us. While history had trained me to be aware of the ongoing possibility of public executions such as that of George Floyd, what I could not have foreseen was how this event would spark off these revolutionary Black-led but multiracial uprisings that would launch an attack on the dominant episteme, on the very symbols of racial domination and violence of our society: police stations, prisons, statues, and all other monuments to racial violence and brutality. I had not anticipated hundreds of thousands in the streets every day for months. The moment we are in right now was unthinkable, unimaginable. It’s believable only because it’s still happening, and I still wake up worrying sometimes that I only dreamed up this part.
But you’re correct, Leanne, that each wave of struggle builds on the last. Resistance to the settler, police, and military brutality at Oka inspired three decades of struggle in its wake. Idle No More did not end but planted seeds. And, as this moment is making clear, the Black Lives Matter movement born in Ferguson in 2014—BLM 1.0—did not end, either, but saw the creation and expansion of root systems that would be ready for the next act. That would prepare us for the fire this time. Preceding moments of struggle that led us into this moment did what so many of us could only hope they could: they have turned into a movement. Including but extending well beyond the formal organizations in the Movement for Black Lives, new formations of struggle in defence of Black life seem to be emerging daily, organized and informal, across cities and towns, together forming a life-affirming crescendo impossible to ignore.
As I’m sure you’re aware, in the US, people have been in the streets, in cities like New York, Portland, and Minneapolis, defying state-imposed curfews and massive levels of police violence for over thirty days, demanding not only an end to violent policing but an end to a society governed by racism, governed by violence. Demanding a society based, instead, in care. At my most recent count there were, over a period of three or so weeks, seventy protests across Canada related in some way to calls to defund/disarm/dis-mantle/abolish police. For over two weeks, a new collective called Afro-Indigenous Rising has held down an encampment, with tents labelled “abolition camp,” hosting teach-ins on police abolition. The new queer Black formation Not Another Black Life, born in the wake of the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet in a police interaction, led a march of ten thousand through the streets of Toronto. Halifax saw its largest street protests ever, and Winnipeg held a week (!) of actions in support of police defunding and against anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism, one in which mostly young, mostly Black people took over the Convention Centre, riding up the escalators chanting “No justice no peace! Black Lives matter!” Intergenerational gatherings of people—Black-led, broadly, but with mass multi-racial support—are taking to the streets risking their health, in a time of a global pandemic, to demand a new world.
As is usual for me, I’m writing you, but I’m also distracted. And so in another window of my computer screen, I’m re-watching the footage from the protests earlier tonight. Rajean Hoilett, a member of Toronto Prisoners’ Rights Project, takes the mic at the street occupation: he’s just stated that so far this summer, there have already been five hunger strikes in Ontario’s jails. Five!
This is a summer of revolt.
This is the summer that we collectively breathe light into a new world. Or at least, the possibility of one.
I’ve hosted a few community Zooms, trainings on police abolition work, and in doing so I’ve met incredible, brilliant, cross-generational but broadly young, new, and extremely committed Black peoples working to overturn the violence of policing in all its forms. Over Zoom and the thousands of new WhatsApp and Signal threads that have started since this all began, I’ve learned enormously, have heard from Black and Indigenous peoples in the Yukon who are working to defund the RCMP, and from young Black activists in Kitchener-Waterloo, Edmonton, Hamilton, and Vancouver who are working to get police out of schools. Many have been successful, and many more likely will be.
I have never seen a more exciting time.
It’s more than the numbers, mind you. The very grounds from which we stand and from which we wage our struggle have been altered. Cedric J. Robinson wrote, in 1975, that in periods of mass unrest, we bear witness to a “revolutionary attack on the culture.” In order for movements to be successful, in his analysis, a mass collective of people needs to be able to reverse the language, the symbols to which they are opposed, and to instill them with new meanings. Put differently, a sign of success within movements is when we are able to intervene in the dominant logics of the times and to collectively produce new meanings. And I believe strongly that this is what we are experiencing in this moment: a revolutionary attack on the culture, led by everyday people, self-organized communities, by the formal organs of social movements, working together in long-term or short-term, and even in momentary capacities.
So many taken-for-granteds of the institutional violence woven into daily life are not only being exposed, but overturned, including the state-sanctioned terrorizing of Black children in public schools across North America. School boards in Minneapolis have severed their contracts with the Minneapolis Police Department, Oakland passed the “George Floyd Resolution to Eliminate the Oakland Schools Police Department,” the Denver School Board voted this June to phase police out of its schools, San Francisco and San Jose voted to suspend or disband school police contracts. And all of this is possible because there is an ever-expanding understanding in our streets and communities at this time that it is not only police violence, but policing itself, that is a source of harm in our society. Large swaths of the population are mapping out the meaning of safety beyond/without the police, prisons, and all forms of surveillance and captivity, and demanding nothing less than liberation.
This has occurred because of a revolutionary shift in the very meaning of safety. And in this instant, policing has been de-linked from its association with public safety, from being upheld as the site of public safety, has been exposed as its anathema. Consequently, it is no longer taken for granted that policing is a natural, necessary, and permanent feature of society. That has been ruptured, perhaps inalterably.
This is a wildly generative breach. Because as it has been increasingly understood, across North America, that policing is itself the opposite of safety—safety’s negation— much else has been made possible. It is hardly radical to desire safety, to believe that we deserve safety. And once we understand that safety does not come from the police, especially not if you are Black or Indigenous, it becomes possible for large numbers of people to ask, If not this, then what? And in this very questioning, to begin to generate expansive alternatives, to undertake a meaningful study of, and experimentation with, what safety could look like, otherwise. Because of course, if safety does not come from the police, then it is only reasonable that we must support the creation of real safety, of felt, embodied, and lived forms of security, with all that we have. That safety could be reconstituted as care is indeed a revolutionary proposition.
People are revolting for wildly imaginative things: for worlds radically transformed, for the end of policing, the end of prisons, the end of ICE and the CBSA, of militarism and colonialism. At the same time, people are revolting for what are considered—or what should always have been considered—the most basic of things. The hunger strikers in the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre, for example, are asking for decent food, clean water, phone calls to their loved ones. This highlights yet again that basics, “givens,” are not given but purposefully withheld. Of course, it is because this systematized neglect is so endemic that we are faced with the demand for something new. It’s the consistent and structural refusal to meet people’s basic needs that is the status quo; the ongoing and structural denial of meeting basic needs is in fact the reality which underlines the necessity of a broader transformation. Mass uprisings like these are truly simple, in this sense: a demand for the necessities of life exposes how purposefully these are denied.
And if you’ve been reading, as I have, the demands being forwarded on these streets, the demands that have proliferated across North America, it is clear that not only are police budgets under attack, but there is a massive groundswell geared towards funding community supports that are not rooted in the surveillance and punishment of our communities, but in truly allowing our communities to flourish. Because “the opposite of a carceral society is a care-based society.”
And yet so crucially: while there is a newness to this world, this life, this summer—it’s built from generations of intellectual and political labour.
This revolutionary summer with its even more revolutionary demands felt like it came out of nowhere. Yet in many cities across North America, work to divest from police, abolish police, had been part of a daily grind of struggle outside of the public eye for years, even decades. Outside of public moments of attention, of course, organizing does not sleep. Before this summer of revolt, work had already been underway in Minneapolis, Chicago, LA, Toronto, to decouple police from schools, to remove police from Pride parades. In Toronto’s case, in fact, this work was highly successful: efforts by LeRoi Newbold of Freedom School Toronto, LAEN, Education Not Incarceration, and BLM-TO had already achieved the end of School Resource Officers (SROs) in the Toronto District School Board, Canada’s largest. BLM-TO had already won the struggle to remove police from Pride. Working with Randy Riley and other Black prisoners, El Jones, Black liberation visionary and long-time prison abolitionist, was nourishing abolitionist freedom dreams for years before the public would listen. This movement, though, had been seeded, nourished, too, from longer traditions of Black radicalism: from abolitionist organizing in North America against the prison-industrial complex; by the women of colour–led projects of INCITE!; by Critical Resistance, founded by Beth Richie, Angela Y. Davis, and many others in 1997; by the intellectual and political labours of incarcerated Black political prisoners; by the Quakers; by survivors of sexual and gendered violence; by my formerly enslaved ancestors. Generations of political and intellectual labours have informed and are informing the visions and worlds that are being fashioned in our present moment. I say this to highlight the sometimes unseen and uncredited work that made possible the emergent logics of these times: the public education and organizing that was required to get us, as a society, into a position from which a movement to defund/abolish police could emerge.
And it feels unbelievable that we are where we are. I remember, at a police abolition conference earlier this year, facilitated by long-time Black feminist activist-scholar Rachel Herzig,* a few of us joking about how we hoped, but did not expect by any means, that we would live to see a time where our people would be penning op-eds about police abolition, talking about it on the news, bringing it into mainstream conversations. I don’t think any of us imagined or even dared to fantasize that we would be reading, and sharing, only a few months later, Mariame Kaba’s “Yes, We Literally Mean Abolish the Police,” published in the New York Times, of all places.
And listen, when it comes to reform, we have tried, and we have been tried. The first crescendo of Black Lives Matter resulted in a series of public statements and piecemeal changes by lawmakers and some politicians. More diversity of officers, “implicit bias training,” all of this meant to sell us on the idea that tinkering with the system of policing would be enough to foster change. When the police in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd, the city had already had an Indigenous woman as its chief of police. George Floyd was killed under the leadership of a Black chief of police, was killed by police who were wearing bodycams, by a police force who had gone through trainings that explicitly taught them not to hold people detained in prone positions such as that experienced by Floyd. We have lived and died for generations now within the limited and limiting promises of reform.
I was educated by my elders about the energies extracted from past generations of Black radicals into police reforms. Movement elder Brenda Paris, a Montreal-based Black feminist now in her late sixties—who fought the arrests and deportations of Black students under the 1969 Concordia computer riots—schooled me on this. She helped me see just how long they have been dodging us, avoiding meaningful change by means of tiny “reforms” explicitly designed to waste our energies, to wait out the moment of public scrutiny while maintaining the status quo. She taught me about how after police killed a Black teenager, Anthony Griffin, in 1987, and the city was aflame in protest for days, Black folks—Black women especially—who had protested, like herself, had been pulled in by the city to train the police on racial bias. They entered into this work begrudgingly, of course, yet wishing to do anything that could put an end to the unrelenting violence of the policing of Black Montreal. She described to me, with a weariness in her voice, the bone-deep disappointment when the early 1990s brought us more of the same: the deaths of Leslie Presley, Marcellus Francois, Fritzgerald Forbes, Trevor Kelly.
I would learn, later on, about the Black Action Defence Committee (BADC)’s push for the creation of the independent oversight of police. This activism emerged in response to the 1970s police murders of Buddy Evans and Albert Johnson in Toronto, and the epidemic of police killings of Black folks that went on to shake the community in the 1980s. While BADC surely dreamed of far more than the creation of a new racist institution, that is what they got. Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit (SIU), ostensibly a “police oversight unit,” would be staffed by ex-police who would exonerate 99 percent of the police who killed. Kikélola Roach, daughter of BADC co-founder Charles Roach, spoke of her father’s rebuke of the so-called oversight body, stating on Twitter that “[BADC’s] activism is credited for creating the SIU. But he always used to say the SIU was like getting a car but with no steering wheel and no gas. It never took us where we needed to go.”
In my own time, working in a group called Justice for Victims of Police Killings with Bridget Tolley, an Indigenous woman from Maniwaki whose mother was killed by the Sûreté du Québec, alongside many other family members who’d lost loved ones to police, we tried. And tried. When Gladys Tolley—Bridget’s mother—was struck and killed by a Sûreté du Québec patrol car in 2001, the brother of the man who’d struck Gladys presided over the investigation. Marches, vigils, public education; more family members of loved ones killed joined us, and we worked, from 2010 onward, to end the practice of police investigating police, to get a non-police-based investigation body set up, only to see, in 2016, the establishment of a so-called independent police investigation body, staffed largely by former police officers, à la SIU.
Throughout my twenties, I, like so many others who work in community and harm reduction, have had to eat shit, time and time again, as tinkering with the system, senseless by design, stood in for transformative change. Have sat on countless neighborhood meetings where we decried ongoing police abuse of Black and Indigenous women, while the community police officers—who were inexplicably invited to all municipal neighborhood meetings—promised they would “look into it.” Have, again like countless others, even skeptically and begrudgingly run educational workshops for police officers-in-training about racism and sexism to try to convince them in advance not to beat and rape our people. Have helped collect data for study after study. Black women have been doing this since before I was born. As I said: on reform, we have tried, and we have been tried.
What is being demanded on the streets in this moment is not police “reform.” It is not another study, more diversity training. It is not body cams. It is not more police oversight, it is not putting the police who kill behind bars, even. It is not more Black cops/Black prosecutors/Black heads of state. It’s the end of police, and of policing. And the creation of a society that would not need police and policing.
In this moment, I feel a sense of vindication for my ancestors, and for my comrades and elders and aunties in the movement for Black Lives, as many of their visions are pulled front and centre, scaffolding the freedom-oriented demands in a moment of historic revolt.
Yet Indigenous radicalism, in its multiplicity of traditions, has, too, been foundational in the development of my own belief in what is possible, and has helped many of us see the kind of intellectual and political work that is possible, necessary, to make this world livable.
You’re right, Leanne, that I was too young to have any lived memory of the Oka crisis—or, to use Ellen Gabriel’s term, the 1991 Siege of Kanehsatà:ke. Still, its legacy had a long-standing ripple effect on my life; it diffused into all movements that would come afterward. The Mohawk response to the siege was a substantial part of my own political education, and everyone’s around me. The entirety of my early adult life was spent in Montreal, just under an hour from Oka, so my involvement with organizing at that time meant, fortunately for me, that I was able to absorb, if vicariously at times, many of the lessons of Mohawk struggle. Ellen Gabriel made frequent appearances on a no-borders community radio show that I used to co-host. I learned from her and many others about the collective organizing, tactical strategy, sacrifice, and enormous courage demanded of those who struggled for over two months in the face of vast, militarized state repression.
One of my most formative early political experiences was, in fact, witnessing Mohawk resistance, though it took place nearly twenty years after Oka. This time around, though, the resistance to the state was taking place in the community of Akwesasne. There I saw first-hand the power of mass collective resistance against the violence of the settler state that I reside in.
In 2009, the Canadian government announced that the US–Canada border would now be armed: that Canadian border agents would now have guns with live ammunition, after generations of one of the longest non-militarized land borders in the world. The Mohawk community living in Akwesasne—a territory cut in half by the US border— refused, quite simply refused, to allow the border that cuts through their territory to be militarized.
The border, and the Canadian state’s ability to control movement across it, has been a site of struggle for over a century. As Audra Simpson has detailed carefully, the Indian Defense League of America had been organizing against— and indeed rejecting—the border’s imposition, and fighting for Indigenous freedom of passage since at least the 1920s. Community members rightly opposed the militarization of a border that had, already, been viewed as an illegitimate imposition on their territory, making it difficult—illegal!— for family members to visit one another without the formal permission to cross that is the prerogative of Canadian border agents. The border’s militarization, though, was the last straw. I was invited to join a delegation in support of hundreds of community members gathered at the border to oppose its militarization. To my surprise, by the time our delegation had arrived, the Canadian Border Services Agency had abandoned the border station entirely.
I don’t know that I can describe for you the feeling of awe that worked its way through my body when our car pulled up, when I looked at the border station and realized it was un-manned, and when I looked up and saw the vibrant purple and white of the Mohawk flag soaring in the air against the skyline, having been raised on the pole in front of the CBSA station where the Canadian flag had been. A celebration, now, of nation, not nation-state. The border guards, who I can only assume were told to depart by higher-ups wishing to avoid another shameful international incident, had simply up and left. Instead, a large community gathering was taking place: speeches, fires, song. This was a celebration, a militant affirmation of life: we were hosted, fed, and educated. It was more than the negation of a carceral and militarized zone, more than a border closure: it was the creation of communities, otherwise. (And as I think through this, Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s voice whispers in my mind once again: “Abolition is about presence, not absence.”)
This was not a full victory, of course, given that the border itself remains. Given, too, that the border guards are, in the end, armed, albeit in a new station that is a few miles away from the old one. And of course, we are writing to one another in territories that are still occupied by the Canadian nation-state. But nonetheless, here I had witnessed a demand—not a request—made upon the Canadian state. And one that was met with a level of state surrender that my twenty-two-year-old self, a baby Black radical, in but not of the Canadian state, could not have foreseen or envisioned. It briefly made visible, too, that there are other ways to organize human life, that we can hold space alongside one another, in the absence of harmful institutions. This was a pivotal period of development, when I had bestowed on me lessons which would take years to truly sink in and are certainly sinking in still.
Even as Black radicalism has for me always been the centre from which other forms of learning were supplemented, Indigenous resistance struggle has been foundational to my political development, being, as you’ve termed it elsewhere, “the longest running resistance movement in Canadian history.” Indeed!
And about solidarity across communities, despite zones of political or strategic difference, I learned this from a 2009 phone call with Ashanti Alston, former Black Panther, a movement elder and a survivor of the war that came before: “If people in Puerto Rico are fighting for independence, you don’t necessarily have to agree with all the ways that they envision that, and the way that they fight, but you know that they have the right to conduct their struggle in the best way—that they need to do it to get the boot of imperialism … off their neck. You support that.”
He went on to say that in the US, “our Black liberation struggle is still in so many ways an anti-colonial struggle, a five-hundred-year-old struggle.” Solidarity across anticolonial struggles, within and across communities working to get the boot off of our collective necks—I feel fortunate to have learned about this at a young age. There remains much to learn about solidarity from people who came up against the boot of the empire and survived.
In what now feels like lifetimes ago, the last trip that I’ve taken out of Toronto was about one week before the stay-at-home orders hit. Along with a few other Freedom School parents, I went up with a carful of kids to the blockades at Six Nations in support of the Wet’suwet’en land defence. That moment had become, as Katherine McKittrick described on Twitter, “a network of anticolonial struggles” traversing wide-spanning geographies. Because 2020 was ushered in with solidarity blockades that spanned the whole of Turtle Island, across so-called Canada and up to Standing Rock. It felt like the beginning of something massive. It was already something massive, transformative, historic, radical anti-capitalist Indigenous resistance to extraction. Standing up against the sheer weight of colonial violence and extraction, staring down the settler police force, defending traditional lands and inspiring a generation of young people.
And when the many solidarity blockades ended, seemingly overnight, with the announcement of the global pandemic in mid-March, I feared for what this would mean for the possibility of land defence going forward. I feared that we were entering an era where not only would all forms of protest, rebellion, and emancipation be aborted, but that pipelines, fracking, and other forms of racial ecocide would continue unabated (and of course, that part turned out to be true).
But today, we find ourselves in a moment where police stations have been burned to the ground, where city governments are talking about dismantling entire arms of the state (though we’ll see). And while I have no unfettered optimism that the state, out of benevolence, will redefine its own structure and functions, I am no longer pessimistic about the future of protest, in this time. How could I be? I feel, too, that the Wet’suwet’en solidarity blockades midwifed our world—or at least those of us in North America—into the next phase of struggle, from one transnational anti-colonial nexus to another: a historic year of protest for Indigenous land, for Black life, and for a new world.
Importantly, in this moment, I’m seeing our communities fighting together. This struggle touches close to home, of course, for our people. Indigenous feminists like Pamela Palmater and Emily Riddle have been supporting the #DefundThePolice movement and expanding its scope, forwarding a call to #DefundTheRCMP—an institution born to clear Indigenous peoples from their lands in the West. They have been foregrounding, too, how policing connects to the violent theft of Indigenous territories that continues to this day. This chorus of voices, spanning both our communities, is reflected, too, in emergent struggles on the ground. Black and Indigenous communities are, in this moment, coming together to challenge the very institution that has relegated so many of our peoples to early death.
Defunding is not just slashing the funds allotted to policing, it is creation: it is Mad co- led mental health response, a safe drug supply and housing for all, and free public transportation and status for all, and education and childcare and the conditions for vitality and life and life and life and life and life.
I believe it was at David Chariandy’s book launch a few years ago that I was speaking to Dionne Brand. Probably blabbing on nervously, I was enthusiastic, describing how, surely, something was in the air—Black radicalism, Black thought, Black writing, was having a renaissance like I had never before witnessed. Because that was a year: we were anticipating the release of her Theory and The Blue Clerk; David’s Brother had just come out and I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You was on its way; Desmond Cole was well into The Skin We’re In, then still in process—all of this nourished by and nourishing Black struggle on the streets, in our schools, across our communities. She responded, and I’m paraphrasing her slightly here, “Sure. But what we need to do, what we really need to do next, is to change the air.” That correction, the crucial distinction that she had forwarded, continued to sit with me for a long time.
And it is this change in the air that is upon us right now.
In real time, our communities are rescuing the term “safety” from where it had been languishing within the carceral regime and bringing it into as expansive a realm as possible. Insisting that if we want safety, really, we can, and will, attempt to resolve social, racial, gendered, and economic inequalities that are the root cause of harm; that we can and will choose to resolve the issues rather than police the people most harmed by them.
And we’re closer to winning than I have seen us! On the cultural level: What other word but “winning” describes the fact that 50 percent of Canadians support defunding the police—nearly three-quarters of my generation? This is substantial: by way of comparison, in 1964, a majority of white New Yorkers surveyed by the New York Times said they believed that the civil rights movement had gone too far.
I’m not one to declare victory prematurely, though. While we’ve changed the air, collectively, it’s of course too soon— far too soon and far from accurate—to declare that we’re winning on the political front, on the institutional front. Because while the public’s thoughts are changing, those in power are not changing alongside them. Amidst widespread calls to slash the police budget, Toronto has upheld a motion to increase police funding by investing in body cams, a move echoed by Montreal mayor Valérie Plante, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on a national level. Culture is only one front of the struggle: if we are changing the air, we have not yet radically transformed and rebuilt institutions that harm and maim into conditions that heal and sustain. But this does not and should not diminish the importance, the historic nature of this moment.
Changing the air is vital. It is a precondition to the possibility of systemic transformation; it’s integral to struggle; it helps us, as Toni Cade Bambara describes it, to “make revolution irresistible.”
Audre Lorde says, “social protest is to say that we do not have to live this way.” It is a rejection of “the inconsistencies, the horror, of the lives we are living.” And this generative rejection, this demand for another way of living, is louder and more vibrant and more wide-spanning than I thought I would live to see, especially in these times.
Abolition is world-building. It is building the worlds we want and need. I know that we are not yet there, and that so much can still happen to undo this moment of possibility. But I am savouring it, still. Because I don’t know what lies ahead, I want to commit to memory what it feels like to be sitting so close to the possibility, at least, of such large-scale transformation.
We haven’t had a chance to speak in person since all of this has unfolded. And every day is a fucking month, right now, so it feels like it’s been years since I’ve heard your voice, seen your face. I miss you, Leanne. Right now, Mark Saunders and Justin Trudeau are kneeling on my neck but I love writing you, and won’t let those clowns impede this communion. As I look back through my phone, almost all of our photos sent over text messages in the last few months are pictures of our kids at protests. I sent you pictures of L. and a dozen or so other Black children in Freedom School, holding up a banner we’d made that says: “Black kids in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en.” A bit later on, you sent me one of your two young ones holding up signs that say “Nishnaabe Solidarity with Black Lives.” I think, or rather I know, that this is because we are mutually committed to one another’s lives and one another’s living, working to build a society in which that living, period, is not so continually threatened.
But of course you and I are talking about world-making all the time, have been since we first met a few years back. At the time you invited me to Dechinta, I was in one of the many burnout phases that plague me even though I am technically old/wise enough to know better. I was looking forward to the visit but felt a bit apprehensive: of having to pretend not to be a wuss about the cold, of my own shyness and extreme awkwardness in group settings. That nervousness quickly fell into the background, though. As I remember it, there was not so much an itinerary as a plan, as Glen said, to “let the land do the work for us.” And that is exactly what we did. What it did.
I remember sitting, with an early-morning coffee you’d brought me, in an old fur-lined canoe attached to a snowmobile, legs covered in a blanket and looking into the blue sky. It wasn’t as cold as I had feared. I will not forget soon, maybe ever, the feeling of holding on tight as we took off from Yellowknife and sped over the (mostly) iced-over river towards Denendeh, me always slightly worried that Glen would accidentally drown us all, but mostly trusting the process. I remember us discussing our communities’ respective histories of radicalism, of struggle. And I remember my usual social anxieties dissolving as we discussed our own understanding of ethical relations, commitment to political struggle, and world-building.
By the end of the two days on the land with you and yours, and me and mine, I was giddy, if ill: in my enthusiasm, I had chain-smoked continuously and my body hates when I do this. I had eaten muskox, kept good company, spent time on the land. I had witnessed, by watching and by speaking with the program’s Elders, a tiny fraction of the immense wisdom that they hold; the complex knowledge required to live and make life in this territory, built over centuries; the nuanced perceptions required to understand the positions of fish, the use of animals to nourish and of plants for medicine; the knowledge required to subvert the constant threat of terror from violent white settlers. Witnessing and experiencing all of this alongside you and our other comrades, I felt, for a rare moment, invincible.
I’m bleary-eyed, truly; it’s not even nighttime anymore but morning. But I feel committed to this moment. I want to do what I can to struggle through this time, alongside you. To experiment, try, fail if we must, learn, regroup, try again. I want to contribute, to the best of my abilities, to all of this ambient frenetic energy that surrounds us right now. I want to do my part to help “shape change,” to think with Octavia Butler again, to help in any way I can to guide this moment toward the most liberatory possible ends, while this energy is still here, still with us.
In this time that our communities, collectively, are changing the air, have changed the air, I want us to win as much as is possible, to use this window as well and as wisely as we can. It’s in protracted struggle alongside one another that we get to the heart of what it means to get free. It’s you and I eating muskox in Dene territory, it’s watching these second-gen Bahamian kids screaming— in equal parts joy and terror—as they see a net filled with dozens of fish emerge from under the ice, carefully pulled up by Denendeh’s Elders. It’s me bumming all of Glen’s cigarettes as I learn about Dene anti-capitalist struggle, and it’s T.’s Indigenous Freedom School and L. and N.’s Black Freedom School exchanging tips on pedagogy, planning exchanges, and mapping out the terrain of future liberation, abolitionist futures for the young ones. It’s Black folks supporting Wet’suwet’en and vice versa, it’s Black and Indigenous abolition camps in Toronto parks, it’s tent cities, police stations aflame, and statues of slavers thrown in the sea and it’s our communities, in a chorus, forwarding a collective call to defund/disarm/dismantle/demilitarize/abolish police. It’s #reconciliationisdead spray-painted overtop of every billboard, it’s letters, and hushed conversations at dinner, it’s this, all of it, and so much more.
As I said, I can never sleep anymore, but I don’t think that matters right now. No Black woman I know is sleeping, not well. I think we are awake, collectively, because the energy of this moment of revolt is residing in our bodies, because our ancestors are keeping us awake, using any energy stores that we have available to transfer this energy to our comrades waging struggles in Minneapolis and Wet’suwet’en and London and Cape Town. I think we are awake because none of us wants to sleep through the closest many of us have ever come to feeling like maybe we could truly win this thing called liberation.
* This conference was hosted by a number of organizations, including Interrupting Criminalization and Critical Resistance, both founded and led by Black feminists.
Yesterday, I was in a Zoom webinar discussing the idea of queering in general, and queering land-based education in particular, on a platform that could not be farther away from the one in the bush on the island in Denendeh I described in my previous letter. One of the participants was the very brilliant Kanaka Maoli (Hawaiian) scholar, Manulani Aluli Meyer. We were talking about the pandemic and how, as Indigenous peoples, this crisis and this pandemic are not unprecedented. We have been “here” many times before. She talked about the pandemic in terms of her own Hawaiian cosmology, moving effortlessly between her language and English, explaining that right now, in this time of pandemic, we are also in a tremendous time of upheaval, amplification, intensification and conflict. She spoke of the pandemic as an opportunity for unfolding coherence or awareness, as a stimulation for the concept of aloha, and reminded us “Ulu a’e ke welina a ke aloha. Loving is the practice of an awake mind.” Her people were organizing, reattaching themselves to Kanaka Maoli practices. Noelani Goodyear-Ka’ōpua, a Kanaka Maoli political scientist, describes hulihia—an “over-turning, [a] massive upheaval, so great that when the churning eventually slows, our lives will be permanently altered.” These Kanaka Maoli thinkers are moving through the pandemic as an opportunity to strengthen their communities. I imagine there is something similar in Nishnaabeg thought, because “massive upheaval” is part of the natural and ecological cycling of the earth. Both Noelani and Manulani remind me that our peoples and our living relations have experienced over-turnings before, several times actually, on both micro and macro scales. It reminds me there are ancient bodies of knowledge that can provide comfort, meaning and guidance through this turbulence. It reminds me of the generative and degenerative energies working in reciprocity with the forces of upheaval. The practice of an awakened mind. Witnessing with clarity. Using sadness, anger and conflict to awaken, amplify, intensify, or what Cree scholar Alex Wilson calls queering—and quoting Kalaniopua Young—the practice of making medicine out of trauma.
There are moments.
This morning I’m listening to part two of a podcast called ‘Give Your House Away, Constantly’: Fred Moten and Stefano Harney Revisit The Undercommons in a Time of Pandemic and Rebellion.” The Undercommons is a book that has always spoken to me, as someone who works primarily outside of institutions, because of Moten and Harney’s insistence on centring Black intellectual pursuit outside of the academy and inside a plethora of modalities—from listening to music, to watching sports together, to kitchen-table discussion. As I’ve witnessed universities move to further entrench Indigenous Studies in the academy, I’ve witnessed similar tensions and losses as our Elders and their knowledge, land pedagogies, and languages are absent and as the majority of our communities and more radical politics are largely missing from these institutions. As Moten points out, Black Study is trying to generate knowledge through an endless process of asking, What are we going to do and how are we going to live? This cannot be reducible to reading and writing and talking about books.
Robyn, how are we going to live and how are we going to live together?
Today Moten begins the conversation talking about the idea of home and homelessness. He talks about how for white Americans (and Canadians), home is thought of as a sovereign place, “home is your castle,” an enclosed space that you own and put a fence around, surveil and guard. He contrasts this with his own experience of home as a Black child with a mother who was a schoolteacher who continually brought students home with her, and how his feelings of missing home are missing the “constant violations of the boundaries of so-called home” as his relations came through the door without knocking. He goes on to explain home-lessness as “not a condition of where you have no place to stay. Homelessness is not a condition where you don’t have a house. Homelessness is the condition in which you share your house, you give your house away constantly as a practice of hospitality. Home is where you give home away.”
This resonates strongly with my own Nishnaabeg feelings of home, nationhood and territory. This continual practice of hospitality is spoken about in my culture, and other Indigenous cultures, as an ethic of sharing. Share everything you have. It is repeated over and over in story after story. It is demonstrated and embodied by fluent speakers, Elders, and Knowledge Holders. It is practised by harvesters whether they are hunting animals, fishing, or picking medicines and berries. It is practised in the face of extreme poverty, on reserves and in the streets of inner cities. It extends past material possessions to include time, space, emotions, and labour. It is ritualized in ceremony, where food and material items are literally given away. It remains strong and steadfast in our communities today, whether those communities are reserves, in the city or everywhere in between.
Last March, I was hoping to share the experience of making maple syrup with you and your relations as a continuation of the work we did together in Denendeh, but this time in my territory. So much of the politics of sap and sugar are about sharing. In the origin story of how maple sugar came to the Nishnaabeg, a squirrel, whose nation, homespace, sovereignty co-exists with mine, shows a child how to chew on a maple twig in spring and find sap. This in turn leads the young Nishnaabeg to enter the homespace, the nation, the sovereignty of the maple, to ask for the consent of the maple through an offering, and the maple agreeing to share their sweet sap with the child. The child then shares their new knowledge with their parents and family. The family then prepares an evening meal, which again is based on the sharing of another nation, the deer clan, this time the body of a deer which is cooked in the sap. The sap boils down to sugar and again, this new knowledge is shared with the larger community, as the child relays the origin story.
If you had been able to come to the sugar bush, land would have figured prominently in our experience, as would have water, which, like us, is part of land. March in Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg territory is wet. The snow is melting, it is sometimes snowing and sometimes raining, the rivers and lake are full of meltwater, the air is humid in contrast to the dryness of winter. We’d begin by collecting the tree water from the trees in the bush. We’d spend hours boiling sap, immersed in steam, taking maybe ninety litres of sap and reducing it to three litres of syrup. There would be a bit of mild struggle over keeping the heat from the fire at the right intensity to keep the sap boiling but not overflowing, another sharing that is a constant negotiation. Another metaphor that emerges from experience. We would insist you take the syrup home to share with your community. We likely would not have talked directly about sharing, but all of our interactions would have been enmeshed with the practice of sharing—you sharing your time, labour, emotional space and intimacy with me. The trees sharing sap with us. The fire sharing heat with sap. Me sharing this intimate practice and my time, labour and emotional space with you. There would be so much sharing braided with care and kindness that we can’t really do what I’m doing here—predict how our relationship might have deepened or the kinds of things we would have talked through during the process. We haven’t yet been able to share in this experience in Nishnaabeg territory because we were all under stay-at-home orders this year during the pandemic, but I know we will.
This politic of sharing is a continual divestment of individuality and a perpetual deepening of the communal or the wider network of life. It is anti-accumulation. The politic of sharing is intertwined with a practice of caring—caring for oneself and for all of the other relationships that form the community, the nation, and the worlds that are overlapping and being continually generated in time and space. Greed is simply unacceptable because of the damage and harm it causes our relations. Withholding one’s time or labour to someone in need is simply unacceptable because it damages our relations and therefore our home.
Sharing is also a foundational practice of the Dene, and one of the reasons we are writing together today. Our solidarity gathering was forged on the practice of sharing— land, water, knowledge, food, labour and a tremendous skill set and collective wisdom that spanned from hunting and fishing to navigating ice conditions to a retelling of Dene history and presence to an embodied practice of Dene law. We were welcomed into Dene homespace with generosity, kindness and care and, in turn, were able to give it to each other. The plants and animals had shared their bodies with our Dene hosts, and they in turn shared everything they had with us. The land and waters are constantly sharing with us, and in that sharing, more life is generated. Visiting is paramount in the politic of sharing as a mechanism to nourish and strengthen relationships, as a medium to exchange knowledge, as a structure that builds and maintains home-space. I’ve seen and felt variations of these practices in Indigenous lands all over the world: the Inuit, Kanaka Maoli, Maori, Kanien’kehá:ka, Mi’kmaq and the Haida. I’ve felt the safest and most cared-for outside of Nishnaabeg lands as a visitor in a Native home.
I’ve recently read the graphic novel Paying the Land by Joe Sacco, a Maltese American journalist who is maybe most well known for his work about resistance in Palestine. Sacco’s new work is about Dene resistance, and so I was reviewing the book to see if it would be useful for my students in Denendeh. I knew the students would be eager to discuss the positionality of Sacco and the ethics of a non-Dene writing about Dene culture and history, and I thought both the students and our Dene staff would find joy in seeing familiar faces and stories in the images in the book. What is clear to me in spending time with this book is that Sacco has forged relationships with Dene Knowledge Holders, and that he spent time in their communities and learning from them on the land. Land-based politics, led by the Dene, are prominent in the stories Sacco re-tells. The acknowledgements section in the book demonstrates a back-and-forth consent process with particular Dene experts. The book for me also is a demonstration of the generosity of the Dene. I can see the Dene ethic and law of “share everything you have” over and over again in the book, from the sharing of food, equipment, and time to the deep and careful sharing of knowledge and the most intimate of stories.
The book is also a sharp reminder that the exploitation of this ethic has been a cornerstone of colonialism. We shared our homes, medicines, food, technology and knowledge with the first colonial invaders so they didn’t die. Sometimes, in the face of five centuries of viciousness and violence in return, I feel ashamed of sharing, as if not sharing and not caring for, as if eliminating the first invaders and colonizers would have stopped colonialism. It would be easy, particularly in the logic of colonialism, to frame sharing as naïveté and a not-knowing—as is often done with regard to the Native, even sometimes in the more radical Indigenous circles that travel within my mind and in my work.
Returning to Moten, I am hearing him say, home is never just your home. It is not an enclosure. It is not property with a picket fence and a guard dog. It is a space created by relationality, constantly visited by insects, mice, squirrels, bears, spirits, winds and rain, plants and medicines, and this visiting forms the network that is the container of home. So yes, we are homeless, not in the sense that we don’t have a house, but in the sense that homelessness is, in Moten’s words, “a condition in which you share your house … in which you give your house away, constantly, as a practice of hospitality.” When practised collectively, this builds the most beautiful responsive formation, continually being remade and morphing to meet the needs of individual beings.
There are requirements, however, for this to work. Requirements that the viciousness (Moten uses this word, and it resonates with me) of white supremacy and the practice of colonialism refuse to fulfill and so, as the old metaphor goes, the settler moves into the Indigenous home, confines us to a closet, and proceeds to take ownership over the house, building a picket fence, acquiring a guard dog and security system. Ah! So in our practice of kindness and sharing and deep care, we will clearly outline our expectations and we will agree to share the space, take care of the space, and respect each other’s decision-making processes, working diplomatically to negotiate solutions to conflict. We will enter a treatied relationship, to be clear.
I’m drawn to the way Moten uses the term “homelessness” as a refusal of homelessness in one sense, as an assertion of homelessness in another sense, and then, finally, as a remaking of what homelessness or homespace means as conceptualized by Black people. I use terms like “self-determination” and “nation” as a way of pushing back against the state and the forces of dispossession—as a refusal of state definitions and Western political definitions and an assertion and remaking of those terms based in Indigenous thought. Similarly, I use the word “nation” both as a push back against colonial understandings of the word and as a way of affirming Indigenous collective and relational formations as legitimate—more legitimate, I’d argue, than settler nation-state formations. It is possible in Nishnaabeg understandings to hold “sovereignty” and “jurisdiction” over land while also affirming the “sovereignty” and “jurisdiction” and “self-determination” of others on the same space, and this requires an intense, intimate and ongoing relationality and shared political understanding. In my mind, this idea of homelessness, to come back to Moten’s term, also extends to territory and nation. Nishnaabeg think of our nation as a home or homespace.
I understand Nishnaabeg nationhood to be a formation of deep relationality, with all of the communities of living beings sharing a particular time and space for their place-making. It is a network, cycling through time. A web of intimate connections where bodies are hubs forming vital pathways and links between plants, animals, rivers, lakes, the cosmos and humans, blurring the boundaries between body and individual in favour of interdependent communal systems—indeed, the spirits of living things are believed to transcend the enclosures of bodies and commingle in realms other than the physicality of the earth. Our homespace is an ecology of relationships in the absence of coercion, hierarchy or authoritarian power.
Kina Gchi Nishnaabeg-ogamig, the place where we all live and work together, the “we” meaning living things, not just humans, is connectivity based on the sanctity of the land, the love we have for our families, our language, our way of life. It is relationships based on deep reciprocity, respect, non-interference, and freedom. It is relationships based on bodily sovereignty and communal sovereignty, so groups of living things can make decisions to best support the overall system in bringing forth mino-bimaadiziwin, in bringing forth a continuous rebirth, in bringing forth more life in all of its different forms. This formation not only makes possible, but actively nurtures and supports the conditions that make possible a diversity of life—the incredible awe-inspiring ways life finds to be in this world. Collectivity is continually generated from individual self-determination and self-actualization, based on political processes that allow divergent and minority voices not only to be heard but, when it is beneficial to the communal, to have profound influence.
Human is not centred. In fact, I’m not even sure I understand the enclosure of “human” within Nishnaabeg thought, other than as a different formation of life and living that isn’t more important or integral than a mouse or strawberries or a lake or a butterfly. And that formation makes capitalism unthinkable—we are taught to give up what we can to support the integrity of our homespace for others with whom we are sharing and for the coming generations of life. We must give more than we take.
This is what I understand our diplomats were negotiating when settlers first arrived in our territory. This was the impetus for those very first treaties: freedom, protection for the land and the environment, a space—an intellectual, political, spiritual, artistic, creative and physical space where we could live as Nishnaabeg and where all living things could do the same.
In radical Indigenous circles, “nation” has come to be a push back against the racist characterization of our communities as being without complex political and governing structures and practices. My use of this term is in line with that tradition. It is a refusal of nation as a Westphalian nation-state and a remaking of the term that is conceptually more similar to larger political formations within Indigenous thought. It is one articulation of an Nishnaabeg homespace. I am also reminded here of Dionne Brand’s comments in her 1996 NFB documentary film of herself in conversation with poet Adrienne Rich: the word “nation,” she says, may just be too contaminated and corrupted by states to be of use, or for us to use the word to mean anything more than nation-state.
In my mind, Indigenous nations, Indigenous homespaces, Indigenous homelessness must be engaged in a radical and complete overturning of the nation-state’s political formations and a refusal of racial capitalism. My vision to create Nishnaabeg futures and presences must structurally refuse and reject the structures, processes and practices that end Indigenous life, Black life and result in environmental desecration. This requires societies that function without policing, prisons, and property. This is a Nishnaabeg formation that must align with radical Black freedom struggles. My world-building must support the world-building of Black freedom struggles. This requires me, like Black feminists and organizers before and alongside me such as Tiffany Lethabo King and Sefanit Habtom, and Moten and Harney in this work, to refuse the opposition of Blackness and Indigeneity. Nishnaabeg formations of nationhood mean a radical overturning of the current conditions and configurations within which we live—an absolute refusal of capitalism.
Going back to Meyer’s insistence that this pandemic is a time of clarity, intensification and thinking, I wonder about how we are creating homespaces. On July 4, 2020, Dionne Brand wrote an article in the Toronto Star entitled “On Narrative, Reckoning and the Calculus of Living and Dying.” Like Meyer, Brand diagnoses our present:
I know, as many do, that I’ve been living a pandemic all my life; it is structural rather than viral; it is the global state of emergency of anti-Blackness. What the COVID-19 pandemic has done is expose even further the endoskeleton of the world…. The x-ray that is the novel coronavirus exposes once again the bare bones of the social structure in which for Black and Indigenous people governance equals policing.
For Indigenous peoples colonialism is dispossession, a usurpation of political power and the mechanism that attacked our bush economies and replaced them with capitalism. I’ve been thinking about those words of Brand’s, “governance equals policing,” and how this relates to Indigenous experiences with land and homespace. State governance requires policing in all its forms to maintain expansive Indigenous dispossession. Dispossession that is not only expansive, but also recursive.
“Recursive dispossession” is a term Robert Nichols uses in Theft is Property!: Dispossession and Critical Theory to describe the conversion of Indigenous belongings to land into property as a precursor to colonial theft. Using the thinking of Black feminists, Indigenous scholars and the Black Radical Tradition, Nichols makes several interventions regarding dispossession. He uses the idea of recursive dispossession as a theoretical and practical way to move through the dilemma of “If you don’t own land, how can it be stolen?” He argues that “in the specific context with which we are concerned [Anglophone settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance], ‘dispossession’ may be coherently reconstructed to refer to a process in which new proprietary relations are generated but under structural conditions that demand their simultaneous negation. In effect, the dispossessed come to ‘have’ something they cannot use, except by alienating it to another.” In other words, colonialism converts Indigenous attachment to land into property as it dispossesses us of it and steals the property. A particularly Indigenous experience of property as theft, as Nichols says.
Reading Nichols’ book got me thinking about how these ideas play out not only in the realm of the academy, but in my own life and in Indigenous life in the present. It got me thinking about ways to push back against expansive and recursive dispossession from within Nishnaabeg thought. It got me thinking about how much I’ve learned about my body and its experience of dispossession from Black feminists—thinkers like Hortense Spillers, Katherine McKittrick, and El Jones, and all of the organizing from the most recent summer of revolt.
Following Moten’s refusal and remaking of the idea of homelessness, I resist the logics of property, meaning I’m not interested in taking property back, but pushing property back. I’m not interested in thinking about getting land as property back, but rather about rejecting the kind of desecration or defilement of the broader life systems that generate Nishnaabewin. I’m interested in refusing the logics of property. Let me explain.
I have a canoe made of Kevlar and carbon, made by “Canada’s Oldest Canoe Company,” in my backyard. It is red. I bought it with my first paycheque from Trent University, twenty years ago. It took all of the paycheque. I most definitely should have paid off student debt or bought professional-looking clothes, but I bought a canoe. Now in my language, this canoe would be considered an inanimate object. Because it is made out of Kevlar, because I bought it, paid for it with money I had earned by engaging in wage labour, I own it. It is my possession.
Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, I have another canoe in my backyard. This one, I made out of four trees: birch, spruce, cedar, and ironwood, with an Nishnaabeg Elder and canoe builder. In my homespace, I share both time and space with these four trees and many others, as living sovereign beings. I am ethically required to seek out their consent and engage in reciprocity with these trees as a way of living in this world. I am required to nurture and maintain a meaningful relationship with them—from harvesting and using their medicine, to protecting their access to the things they need to live, to defending their habitat from life-ending forces, to engaging in conversation or prayer with their spirits. I take on the responsibility to learn what time of year is best to engage in harvesting practices, and which methods of harvest cause the least harm to the wider community. I’m required to use everything I take, to share everything I’ve gained from these trees, and to take only what I need. I am required to braid these four trees together into a canoe the best way I can, putting good emotion and positive thought into the making process. In short, in order to harvest these trees, I am required to engage in an ongoing intimate relationship with each of these living beings. Put another way, I am required to carry the responsibilities for these relationships throughout the entire time I’m in relation to the canoe. When the canoe can no longer fulfill its purpose, I’m also required to return it to the earth, so that life can break it down into its constituents and make more life anew. If I can no longer fulfill my responsibilities to the canoe, I must find someone else who can.
This canoe, this jimaan, is very much alive. It is not a possession. It is not my property. I do not own it. I am attached to it. I am related to it. We come from the same place, breathe the same air, and drink the same water. I have responsibilities to the life it is made out of. I have responsibilities to use it in a way that provides for me, my family and my community. I have a responsibility to share it with those that may also need it. I have a responsibility to care for it, to repair it and to maintain it. I have a responsibility to protect it from those who might misuse or harm it or commodify it outside of those original agreements between myself and those four trees, those Elders that shared their making knowledge with me, and the water and heat that allowed us all to combine this life into a new life. Just as those trees have the responsibility to protect the original agreements with air, soil, light, water and the ecology of the forest that gave them life. The same could be said for the tools that I would have fashioned in order to make the canoe and to move the canoe. The same could be said for the water, indeed the aquatic ecosystem that would hold me up when the canoe and I pushed off from the shoreline. Perhaps we would set nets and fish, thus engaging in another set of ethical and consensual relationships. This is a cascading, ever-expanding series of relationships, of attachments, of belongings, that generate meaning from connectivity.
This canoe is not my possession. It is not my property. I do not own it.
It is my relative. I am attached to it. We belong to each other and a network of other relations. I am responsible for caring for it and it is responsible for caring for me—providing me with safe passage on rivers and lakes.
Can you steal something that is not property?
Of course. It seems obvious. If you take something or do something without consent, it is a violation, a theft.
If both of my canoes were stolen from my backyard I would experience the first canoe, the red Kevlar one, as theft, because I relate to it as property.
The circumstances or the context of the taking of the birchbark one from my backyard would matter. If, for instance, the canoe was taken by an Nishnaabeg friend or acquaintance who upheld the original responsibilities, the event might not even register in my consciousness as an event, but rather a normal part of living life in community. If that same person had taken the canoe, and then was unable to care for it because of sickness or theft or some other sort of complication, I might be able to approach the situation with empathy and compassion and work to regenerate the relationships that had been harmed. Indeed, this practice is the basis of Nishnaabeg restorative justice.
On the other hand, if a white person had taken the canoe and cut it up with an axe and lit it on fire because of their intense hatred of Indigenous peoples, as so often still happens, the impact on me would be much greater. In fact, the stealing of the birchbark canoe would feel like a tremendous violation in comparison to the loss of the Kevlar one because it would violate more than just me—it would violate the cascading, expanding series of relationships and responsibilities that allowed the canoe to come into life. The harm of that theft is intimate, and of a different order of magnitude than a loss of a possession.
Consent in this context is about whether you trust someone to uphold the responsibilities to the reciprocal relationships within which life is enmeshed. I consent to share land with the Haudenosaunee or Wendat because I know they will ethically engage in the relationships that make up my land. I will not consent to share land with the French and English and Canadians because over and over again, they have demonstrated they will agree to these responsibilities on the surface, and then set up a series of life-ending systems designed to accumulate wealth for the very few.
This point of conversion of land into property, one that took place historically and takes place continually, requires reinforcement in Euro-Canadian law, policy. When Indigenous peoples push back against recursive dispossession, placing our bodies on the land between the colonizer and the resources they are about to exploit, we are met with state violence in the form of policing, like the Haudenosaunee land defenders faced at 1492 Land Back Lane in Ontario, or the army, in cases like the 1990 resistance at Kanehsatà:ke. More recently, lobster fishers from Sipekne’katik First Nation were met with white violence from white vigilantes.
We know this already. We know the structure of colonialism was maintained and is maintained by policing and authoritarian power over us, and Indigenous thinkers like Sarah Hunt have pointed out that this violence is asymmetric, landing on the bodies of Indigenous women and Two-Spirit/queer people and trans people more intensely and more often than others. Indigenous feminists know that we have been dispossessed of not just our land, but also our bodies and intimacies, our languages, our thought, our spirituality, our creativity and all of our meaning-making practices as a targeted and strategic way of breaking our attachment to land and to each other—as an attack on belonging, as an attack on meaning, as the complete annihilation of homespace. Dispossession for Indigenous peoples, then, is both expansive and recursive; it has attempted to turn our relationality into property and commodity and then taken our minds, bodies, spirits and homespaces away from us. It sells ourselves back to us in various forms of recognition and rights.
Black feminists have taught me a great deal about bodily forms of dispossession. Of course, slavery and anti-Blackness have a different history and set of experiences with dispossession than I have as an Nishnaabekwe because under slavery, Black (and sometimes Indigenous) people themselves, and their kinship, were owned by white people. Black feminist writing has helped me more fully understand my body and how I live in it (or don’t). Hortense Spillers writes:
[T]he socio-political order of the New World … with its human sequence written in blood, represents for its African and indigenous peoples a scene of actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile. First of all, their New-World, diasporic plight marked a theft of the body—a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire.
Anti-Blackness and colonialism are different and multiple modes of violent severing—bodies from land and bodies from will, desire, self; bodies from each other. A severing of ourselves from, as NourbeSe Philip might say, breath. The making and remaking of ourselves, our homespaces and our worlds in exile, amongst the severing, is our normal. Indigenous and Black life is a persistent process of taking back our bodies, our minds, our spirits, our relationality to land and a reclaiming and remaking of our homespaces in spite of constant erasure and elimination.
Black and Indigenous peoples have different and linked experiences with expansive and recursive dispossession of land and bodies. Our different and linked struggles for freedom as a place, as Gilmore reminds us, involve land and bodies. We have been living in successive waves of the pandemics of anti-Blackness and colonialism, in the ever-intensifying crisis of global warming, and, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore says in speaking about abolition, we must change everything—“Abolition is deliberately everything-ist; it’s about the entirety of human-environmental relations. Where life is precious, life is precious. It’s a theory of change.”
Where all life, not just human life, but all life is precious.
I wonder, then, if it would be helpful to foster a different practice to talk about land, territory, nationhood and homespace. Maybe land and our relationships to it can become a listening, a thinking, a speaking in a different register, a different starting point for Black and Indigenous relationality, just as land has become such an important way for me to relate to you, Robyn. Maybe Black and Indigenous land-based politics holds potential for our world-building and freedom struggles; or, as Samudzi and Anderson write, “the actualization of truly liberated land can only come about through dialogue and co-conspiratorial work with Native communities and a shared understanding of land use outside of capitalistic models of ownership.”
Maybe in our practice of liberating lands and peoples, we can be homeless, but together.