One Hundred Forms of Homespace
I’ve always been a nerd. Specifically, a sci-fi nerd. And more specifically still, the kind of sci-fi nerd who, as a child, tried to learn to speak Klingon from her father’s Klingon Dictionary. And so as you can imagine, Star Trek TNG has been a balm to my pandemic insomnia. I was likely influenced by episode 63—the one where the Starship Enterprise passes through a temporal rift and inadvertently creates two timelines, two ships, two futures—when I would find myself, during my walks down a largely empty Bloor Street in late March, musing that perhaps somewhere out there, too, was a timeline in which you and I were making syrup on your land. Where we hadn’t even continued to write one another letters, in the end, because we were too busy speaking in person, riffing ideas, discussing movements and thinkers that were moving us, inspiring us. Where we had maybe taken our kids together on the walk we’d discussed, and otherwise taken a bit of joy and comfort in one another’s presence, small transitory moments amidst otherwise very separate and hectic lives. And as you can imagine, this sort of speculative exercise naturally leads to a contemplation of other timelines, which are never far from my mind, anyways.
For instance, what and who would be here instead of my landlord’s house, the paved streets named after bandits and burglars, here on the lands of Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabeg, and the Wendat? And what else might the human and ecological landscape beneath my feet have become, if not for the long-standing and ongoing occupation and administrative control of the British and French empires, the settler state? Not to mention, of course, where would I be had my ancestors not been kidnapped en masse and used as fuel for the unsettling of this side of the Atlantic world? It’s hard not to focus on the sheer weight of the timelines aborted, globally, by slavery and colonialism, and their afterlives. These timelines seem to bulge inadvertently into this plane, the alternative homespaces and modes of organizing life, the multitudinous other ways that this world and its inhabitants could have been structured. I like to think that they accompany us, glimmering planes of reality alongside our own.
To pick up here where you left off—your words running through my mind and coursing through my veins as always: an awakened mind. An awakened mind, too, is to know that there is nothing natural or inevitable about any part of contemporary governance, about “policing as governance,” per Brand. It is a spiritual and bodily rejection of the egregious violence of the quotidian. It is a refusal of the everyday humiliations of anti-Black surveillance, of the unceasing representations of Black peoples as pathological, of the (attempted) negation of all the richness, beauty, and fullness that is Black life. And it is a felt refusal of the racial and gendered violence that is constitutive of the settler state. And it is an awareness of other possible timelines, alternate futurities, of a liberation not yet arrived.
But in this timeline, I’m sitting in my kitchen, as usual, trying to use this communion to write my way out of a mood, one caused all too predictably by reading the news. You will not normally find me using my energy to point out how this or that piece of writing has failed to meaningfully address racism. Not because it’s not true, but because it’s true so often that it rarely gets a rise out of me anymore. This is how the media operates, with a few rare exceptions. And yet somehow, I’ve been arguing in my mind with a Toronto Star article ever since I first read it over my morning coffee on June 13, when their editorial board published a piece called “Let’s save some outrage for treatment of Indigenous people.”
I’m certain it was intended to be well-meaning, the ostensible goal being to highlight a politic that you and I are both clearly invested in: ending anti-Black racism matters, and so does ending racism against Indigenous peoples. It seems clear that neither of our respective communities is the target audience of the piece (more on that in a moment). However, Black people are being, here, not-so-subtly scolded for an apparent singularity of vision. This is part of a broader disciplining of the Black liberation struggle that Canadian media cannot do without, and one that is rarely levelled at other communities struggling to liberate themselves. The words “Black lives matter” are taken to mean that we wish only for Black lives to matter, and that others do not, or should not. Which disappears both historic and current forms of co-resistance with Indigenous and other communities, as well as the way that Black people’s freedom struggles, even when standing on their own, have historically liberated broad swaths of people. But this kind of misunderstanding, by which I mean misrepresentation of the movement, its maxim, is so classic so as hardly to be notable. And so this is not the place I am focusing my attention—my own outrage, so to speak. Because another subtext that is somewhat more novel in this piece is its deliberate obfuscation of other facts of the matter: that Black and Indigenous struggles are interlocking and interconnected. That all of us stand to gain from the growing movement to defund and abolish policing. That in many instances, our communities have been, in these times, working together to dismantle organized violence and rebuild the world anew. Instead, this analysis, which is by and for white Canadians, pits Black and Indigenous communities against one another as we organize—often col-lectively—for abolition, decolonization, and a police- and prison-free world. It obfuscates, and thus licenses continued negation of the overarching reality that our unfreedom is wrapped in one another’s, and further, that it is these interlocking unfreedoms that are in fact constitutive of the Canadian state—and capitalist states everywhere.
Perhaps what keeps drawing my attention back even more, though, is that phrase in the title: “let’s save some outrage.” Because this forwards the notion that white Canadians’ outrage needs to be saved, neatly portioned out, and carefully preserved, lest it be wasted all in one go (and on the Blacks!). And it is this aspect of the editorial that I cannot shake. It reveals something about the structure of Canadian society and its affective capacities; and, perhaps more importantly, about its structurally limited capacity for in-depth solidarity. Because for your average Canadian there is a limited amount of outrage that can be distributed across the vast injustices of our time. We live in a society that requires that we tolerate a certain—significant—level of violence and death. People dying of overdoses, of exposure, at the hands of police: this is the collateral damage of the mode of governance that we live under. Outrage, then, is finite. It necessarily has an end point, lest the discomfort lead to a broader demand for the always-possible, continually deferred transformations that would be required to shift the tyrannical racial logics of our time. And so outrage needs to be carefully portioned out, in moderated doses, in order to preserve the status quo. The media functions, and the public along with it, such that Indigenous genocide and anti-Black violence erupt into the national discourse only in moments of brief national attention, allowing them to appear to be episodic. Rather than endemic, enduring. And mutually constituting. Outrage needs to be rationed precisely because only a limited amount of “justice” is, in fact, possible, or achievable, for this country to go on as it has. Which is of course the unstated goal of liberal outrage, trimming here and there at the worst and most visible excesses of harm, while leaving a violent system intact. Too much justice—the liberation of Black and Indigenous peoples— would make Canada, as it stands today, impossible.
You would not know from reading this op-ed of the turbulent insurgencies of this time, of two mutually unfolding and as-of-yet unfinished liberation projects that stand to shake the very foundations of this society. But, of course, it is the obfuscation, the misdirection, that is the point. Regardless of intent, the purpose and the function of such an intervention is to cast our struggles in competition, in moments of mass unrest, using colonial fictions to uphold, rather than undo, white supremacy.
And clearly this editorial was not written with us in mind: each of our communities holds enough rage (not outrage) to power the next five generations of freedom struggles.
I have enough rage for Ahmaud Arbery and Colten Boushie and Eishia Hudson and Wabakinine and Wiijiiwaagan and Regis Korchinski-Paquet.
You and I live in a country that is reliant on either our violent exclusion from, or genocidal inclusion into, the nation-state. In cities and in a country where governance as violence and abandonment is the defining feature of daily life. The sheer weight of our respective communities’ presence across the state zones of capture and abandonment make all too clear that we are living and dying in a formation that was not designed for us, but built top of us, to facilitate the exploitation of lands, labour, but not to facilitate life. And most certainly not Black and Indigenous life. The nation-state requires the dispossession of Indigenous peoples’ lands and lives; it requires the destruction of Black peoples’ lives, our flesh, our personhood, our timelines of otherwise. And most of all, the Canadian state requires the destruction of Black and Indigenous freedom struggles, seeking at each instance to undermine and reroute liberatory social transformation by means of criminalization, cooptation or, most often, an admixture of the two. Canada, as it exists today, cannot be recuperated.
The refusal to take things as they are as inevitable or a given: this itself an act of radical imagination, of conjure work. It is its own form of warfare, and of life-making, as well. Because to be attuned to the wrongness, too, is to hold within ourselves the multiplicity of different possible futures, of worlds that are not yet born, of forms of governance based not in violence, but abundance. It is insisting on the possibility of a new timeline, and suggests, too, that they may already be on the horizon. If we care to look.
Last year, I came across Dionne’s short story “100 musicians at Jane and Finch?,” originally published in 2007 in the Globe and Mail. The story revolves, at first glance, around an argument between lovers. The protagonist, June, wakes up with a start, joyously. She has heard, as she exclaims loudly to her lover, the CBC radio host announcing that the mayor would be sending one hundred musicians to Jane and Finch. She is elated: it is brilliant, she says. Her lover, at first amused and then increasingly irritated, insists otherwise, insists she has misheard, that she is mistaken. They have announced, he says, that they’ve found funding to send one hundred policemen to Jane and Finch. June refuses to capitulate. The unnamed lover becomes increasingly frustrated, he can see no sense in what she has heard, what she is celebrating. He tells her “Don’t be naive. They’re gunmen. They’re sending police for the gunmen.” To this, June replies, “The gunmen are children. They need music. They could use some bicycles, some painters, some soccer balls, some trees. The place is pure post-industrial dreck. Who wouldn’t want to murder somebody? A hundred trees, a hundred teachers, a hundred trips out of there, a hundred anything, not a hundred policemen. Why are you so fucking pessimistic?”
At the story’s end, June and the lover have not bridged the chasm. Both have concluded that the other will only hear what they choose, and the lover’s final, chastising inner monologue sums up June as follows: “Like she’s not living in the same time as the rest of us.” The closing of the story leaves us with two timelines, one which moves toward an end to want, and another where we are left with the same old, same old.
Yet an awakened mind, June’s, in this case, rejects that things must go on as they have. June will not concede anything inevitable about the murderous status quo of this city, this country. She will not concede to governance as violence.
This, the discordant visions between June and her lover, is a drama that replays with astonishing regularity in this city and in this country. The competing visions occur between communities and those who hold the power to govern Canada’s Jane and Finches, Montréal Nords, and North Prestons. Each day, modes of living otherwise are violently rejected in the service of more of the same. It is a political choice that is made daily by elected officials whose political imaginations have been so stunted by generations of reliance on “law and order” that they cannot conceive of choosing differently, literally cannot fathom a homespace, a form of governance that would affirm Black life.
June’s lover cannot perceive what Tory and Ford and their supporters refuse to see, which is that their imaginations are impoverished, undernourished, dead or dying. And as a result, the solution to rampant racial and economic inequality is, and can only be, more armed men with guns and cages. More private property and more hired agents to protect it. That this barren vision seems practical to so many, that anything beyond this seems preposterous and naïve, speaks to the banal monstrosity of our times. They simply cannot imagine, as June can and does, that there can be—and must be—more for us.
We, too, must hold tightly to our insistence that there are, always, one hundred otherwises to the violence of contemporary governance.
I’m with you, Leanne: How are we going to live together? And in this place? Those that run this society have tried to lay that out for us. But Black queer folks, radicals, feminists, and other outlaws, I think, have long known that the nation-state form was an insufficient container to hold our most expansive dreams for freedom. And accordingly, that our appeals to the state—for belonging, for the protections of citizenship—would be met with silence, and worse.
This is captured in a discussion between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1984. They discussed the possibilities— and the limitations—of Black people’s freedom within the United States.
Baldwin says this to Lorde:
Du Bois believed in the American dream. So did Martin. So did Malcolm. So do I. So do you. That’s why we’re sitting here.
To which Audre Lorde replies:
I don’t, honey. I’m sorry, I just can’t let that go past. Deep, deep, deep down I know that dream was never mine. And I wept and I cried and I fought and I stormed, but I just knew it. I was Black. I was female. And I was out—out— by any construct wherever the power lay. So if I had to claw myself insane, if I lived I was going to have to do it alone. Nobody was dreaming about me. Nobody was even studying me except as something to wipe out.
Their disagreement is instructive. While Baldwin still held out for the possibility of Black freedom, held that perhaps the American dream could, if cajoled strongly enough, be made to stretch itself out to enfold him, Lorde understood the limitations of the nation-state. She knew that its promises were not meant to be extended to all of us, and could not be made to do so. I don’t mean to be ungenerous, here: James Baldwin was no dupe and he was nobody’s fool. He knew of the unrelenting and merciless brutality of US capitalism, racism, and militarism, knew that “the system is doomed because the world can no longer afford it.” Yet we bear witness, in his discussion with Lorde, to Baldwin’s faith that there remains something, somewhere, somehow recuperable about the United States: if not in its past or present, in its future. And it is this possible recuperation that Lorde altogether refused. As a Black lesbian, a socialist, a descendent of Caribbean migrants, she resided, in more ways than one, on the constitutive outside of the American nation-state. On the outside of belonging, and of protection. Outside by design. Outside of the patriarchy, the racial logics of the citizen, she knew there was no iteration of the USA in which she could belong. And thus for her the American dream was unsalvageable.
I have come back to this discussion quite often. For Black women like Lorde, and for so many others made outlaws of North American society, the home, the nation which is its metonym, emerged historically as a space to actualize the freedom of white, propertied men. And if this promise would later be extended, partially, to white women and promised, if never delivered, to Black men, it would not reach all the way to us. Because “home” has not been safe, after all, for most Black women—neither from the state surveillance and harm, nor from male violence. It is especially not safe for Black queer, trans, gender non-conforming young people for whom ejection from the family home is a fact of life. And it is criminalized, quite literally, for those involved in sex work or drug economies, and others who make ends meet, who forge other kinds of intimacy and family in the grey economies of our cities. And so these formations, home, nation-state, are not elastic enough to enfold those deemed radicals, outlaws, defectors, and deviants. Our dreams have lain elsewhere by necessity.
It’s not only the white-supremacist settler state that poses the problem: the nation-state, as a form of governance, itself needs to be rethought. It requires the production of the outlaw. And it is this outlaw—the migrant, the radical, the queer, the artist, the sex worker—who is criminalized, incarcerated, deported, forcibly “rehabilitated,” set to work in exploitative conditions. And so surely, we can imagine other ways to live together. Other than this.
Dominant Western historiography is replete with fictions that are meant to numb our ability to dream up alternatives, to keep us from breaking up with the timeline we’ve been conscripted into. It crafts narratives of European, North American benevolence, where there has been none, tells a teleology of a steady march toward progress where there has been, instead, unchecked brutality. Accompanying this, we are educated to believe that today’s dominant forms of governance—the nation-state, capitalism, hierarchy and inequality—were and are natural, were and are part of the evolution of humankind, exemplifying the forward march of the universal human spirit.
While these are fictions, without a doubt, I would argue that they are fictions that derived not from the imagination, but from its absence.
I won’t deny that it is highly ambitious to dream of conquering the globe, enslaving entire peoples, wiping out others and indenturing the rest. It is even more ambitious to have fastidiously worked to make this dream a reality. In extending the arms of colonial administration ever outward, the European ruling classes did nothing short of undertaking a project to remake the world—our worlds!— in their image, and to suit their own desires. But ambition toward domination, deliberate obfuscation, these are not the same as imagination.
A lack of curiosity: this is what differentiates the violently speculative project of Western civilization’s last five hundred years from what I would call imagination. We’re speaking, after all, of a worldview so insecure, so based in ambition and domination that it was unable to imagine even the existence of our lifeworlds—except as suffused with pathology, degradation, and lack. This worldview saw our ways of organizing life, our forms of kinship and knowledge of the natural world and wondered at nothing! Saw nothing but empty space, “savages,” resources to be stolen and hoarded.
And worse still, when they encountered the complexities and richness of earthly life, they chose to impose their world-view upon it, with all alternatives dismissed, persecuted, and driven underground. As they steadfastly remade the world— our worlds—they extinguished or nearly extinguished thousands—more!—of other modes of life, of governance, and all their inherent possibilities. Broke up our societies, nearly all non-European societies, at random, slaughtered some, displaced others, re-organized long-standing forms of social and political organization into imperial outposts that served, broadly, as resource colonies, upheld and supported by colonial police and prisons, stamping out other possibilities each time they emerged. Worked to build not just their own homeplaces on top of ours but a world based on civilization as enclosure, freedom as property, and happiness as the amassing of violently extracted wealth. This drive toward sameness and violent hierarchical inclusion would have required a paucity of imagination matched only by an arrogance that is difficult to comprehend.
And it’s from this vacuum of imagination that we were left with the nation-state: the geopolitical administrative units under which our lives are now governed, regardless of our consent.
Black revolutionaries have consistently struggled with the tensions between nation—as a largely de-territorialized way of conceiving the relationships between Africans and the world’s Black diaspora—and the nation-state, in the project of Black liberation, particularly at the height of anti-colonial struggle. After being expelled from Algeria due to his role in the anti-colonial uprisings with the Algerian National Liberation Front, Frantz Fanon dictated The Wretched of the Earth. In this work, it is clear that he saw national liberation struggles in Africa as a step toward a broader African unity, and yet the African nation-state was not the endpoint of anti-colonial struggle. Writing in Tunis while he was in remission from leukemia, he warned that if we constricted our dreams of liberation into the limiting confines of the nation-state, Black people’s freedom, too, would remain bound “within certain territorial limits.” He thus lamented the expulsion of Africans between one nation and another. And this warning served to be true, both on the continent and well beyond, in multiple registers. Thirty years later, Ogoniland defender Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was part of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), one of the many Indigenous groups facing land expropriation by the Nigerian government and multinational companies, wrote a scathing critique. He wrote that the nation-state, on the continent and elsewhere, was born of “European will, European desires,” and continued to serve only the needs of national elite, multinationals, and Western nations. He reminded us that “in virtually every nation-state there are several ‘Ogonis’ being subject to environmental and cultural destruction, and mass poverty.”
I would never deign to collapse the distinctions between the nation-states in Europe and North America—imperial states and their settler colonial outposts— to the postcolonial states that emerged in the wake of anti-colonial nationalist struggles. Because for the non-European-world, the colonial state was literally built on top of us: and national sovereignty—home rule over the territory represented the only possible mode of governance available to those of us who would free ourselves. Black-run nation-states—the only grounds upon which freedom struggles were recognized as legitimate—entered a global economy that was rigged from the start. Parity with Europe and North America was a farce. A new version of dependence awaited Black peoples’ entrance into a global governance structure that was unequal by design.
The nation-state, wherever we find it, is a problem: Black people are still living and dying from the vestiges of colonially-imposed states and the carceral mechanisms installed to support them.
The fact is that Black peoples, formal citizens or no, experience few of the protections of citizenship wherever we live. Gunned down in North American streets by police, mass deported from the USA, Canada, and the continent of Europe. Despite the best intentions of young Kwame Nkrumah, Pauline Opango, Claudia Jones, and countless others who envisioned a freedom of movement across the African continent and the Caribbean region, the logics and technologies of nation-state have prevailed. As M. Jacqui Alexander so aptly described, “not just any (body) can be a citizen” in a nominally decolonized Caribbean. Lesbians, sex workers, and others deemed deviant for non-heterosexual sex were cast outside of the nominal promises of citizenship in post-colonial Trinidad and Tobago. Undocumented Africans from Mozambique, Chad, and Zimbabwe face rampant labour exploitation, populist violence, detention, deportation, and police violence in South Africa, while non-status Haitians in Bahamas were told to leave the country or be “forced to leave” by Bahamian prime minister Hubert Minnis after Hurricane Dorian. It’s not my intention to collapse under broad strokes the demonstrably unique historical and geopolitical contexts of these places. But these occurrences represent a broader pattern: organizing Black life—and human life— into nation-states forecloses the actualization of freedom for Black peoples. Globally, the colonial nation-state, and the logics and carceral practices that it relies upon to function, have not served as an adequate container for Black liberation. Our citizenship is everywhere precarious and contingent, when it exists at all.
Of course, against this barren structure, clumsily but violently implemented across the world, much survived. And our most imaginative thinkers have consistently worked to organize life, to envision emancipation well beyond the terms of governance-as-violence imposed upon us by Europeans. Reading your work has consistently reminded me that while unidentical, our respective communities’ multiple traditions of radicalism have consistently worked to usher in more collective ways of organizing and governing life.
Métis activist and academic Howard Adams, in his 1975 book Prison of Grass, makes it clear that for Métis and broader Indigenous communities in Canada, it is not only colonialism that is the enemy, but the “forms and institutions of colonialism.” The very best of our respective traditions of radicalism have always, anyways, insisted on seeing the wrongness of the world that Europe built on top of us, and dreamed of building old/new forms of home, of governance, new terms under which we could live and work, new ways of advancing and defining our relationships to the land and its human and non-human inhabitants.
Gifts and offerings in your work, my dear. Sovereignty not as ownership and property, but sharing; nationhood as a “series of radiating responsibilities,” over and against the logics and institutions of the nation-state. Outside of the normative definitions of European epistemologies. These formations, and the politics that underlie them, derive from political formations based in non-domination that preceded, have endured, and work to undermine the colonial nation-state. It demonstrates another way for us to live, together.
To recognize that something was built on top of us is generative because it serves to remind, too, that there is no inevitability to the current formations that we reside in. Helps us to hold on to the knowledge that the nation-state, a colonial inheritance, often prevailed despite Black peoples’ labours to build forms of homespace and governance along different lines. Black radicalism is replete with communities working to create forms of organizing life outside the shackles of capital, and outside the limited and limiting structures imposed by European formations. Panther visionary Kwame Ture, for example, clearly identified the United States as a settler colony, as occupied Indigenous lands. He forwarded a vision for a Black nation that transcended geography entirely, from landless Africans in the domestic colony inside the US to the Caribbean and the continent. Black freedom extended necessarily beyond national borders, encompassing a global Black life to be freed from the tethers of police, capital, empire.
Even during the era of mass national liberation struggles, the freedom dreams proffered through Black anti-colonial struggles held a kaleidoscopic array of possibilities for alternative formations of organizing human life, and had not yet calcified inside the nation-state formation. Offered us something else. In this period of radical experimentation with liberated territories, beginning in the twentieth century, decolonization, as Adom Getachew describes it, was more than nation-building, but a project of worldmaking, intended as a radical rupture. Anti-colonial struggle, as she traces it, was not meant to find its culmination as Black leadership over a Westphalian state system in a world still characterized by massively uneven wealth distribution. She details the experiments in re-ordering the world toward the liberation of the global Black world: the Caribbean’s West Indian Federation, Africa’s New International Economic Order. An attempted timeline ushering in Black homespaces the world over, grounded in communalism, socialism, a world free from hardened and impermeable national borders, and untethered by the global racial hierarchies of previous centuries. Which is to say that Black people the world over worked to build a global society that you and I have been raised to believe could only exist in Star Trek and other utopian science fictions.
And yet I do not wish to romanticize away the fact that many conceptualizations of Black nationalism re-affirmed, or at last failed to challenge, patriarchy, and other forms of domination and hierarchy. Cast Black women as the mothers and caretakers of the race. Tried to reify gendered subordination into Black freedom by acting as if it emerged from our very bodies, tethered it to semi-fabricated, mythologized patriarchal “traditions.” Perhaps it’s for this reason, then, that it is from the feminists—the outlaws of the outlaws— that we have continually witnessed some of the most expansive ways to map the world anew. Looking to Claudia Jones (1915–1964), we find an outlaw on multiple fronts, as well as a visionary: a Trinidadian-born Black communist feminist, journalist, and organizer, committed to organizing human life on different terms. She held a wide-spanning vision for Black, liberated territories that extended beyond the yoke of the nation-state. This politic was likely influenced by her experience of being incarcerated, deported from the US, barred from re-entering Trinidad, and finally exiled to the United Kingdom, for her radical politics as a Black woman and openly identified communist. Jones believed that being split into small nation-states would render Caribbean peoples unable to stand up against the colonial forces of British and American imperialism, and instead had an expansive vision for Black and multiracial homespace. She fiercely advocated, in the newspaper that she edited, the West Indian Gazette, for “an end to all restrictive practices towards minorities, an extension of civil and cultural rights and freedom of movement” for people across the Caribbean. Up to the last years of her life, she saw a united, socialist Caribbean as a necessary move into the future, toward a world that could be free of its vast geopolitical racial inequities, free from American and European imperialism. Her vision for liberated Black territories stemmed from the outside in: Black women, mothers, workers in the colonies being the centre from which a global economic and racial justice could be re-organized. In her words and in her vision for the West Indian Federation, we find a liberatory timeline mapped out, if never born, of Black life beyond the narrow confines of nation, beyond the ongoing violence of capitalism and empire. Beyond the limiting structures of patriarchy. Arising from the needs of those rarely considered within Black liberation projects of the era—the lives of Black women, mothers, and workers in the colonies—were timelines toward new terms of belonging, of mobility, of liberated territories for Black peoples. I like to hold on to the timeline in which Jones grew old in the liberated Caribbean she worked so steadfastly to manifest in her writing and organizing.
These dreams, however, were not realized. The Federation collapsed; Jones died a few years later. Yet many more had come to see how the nation-state formation was limited, despite formal decolonization and work to escape the limitations it imposed on Black struggle. Trinidadian by birth, C. L. R. James, too, was made an outlaw by multiple nation-states: detained and expelled from the US and held under house arrest in post-colonial Trinidad, experiencing the blunt arm of the state on multiple occasions, he was a Black radical exiled, broadly, from any particular vision of home. The first edition of James’s A History of Pan-African Revolt—published in 1938, in the early years of Black anti-colonial struggle—is wildly optimistic, tracing the legacies of Black struggle and filled with liberatory visions for a Black world which had freed itself from (formal) slavery, and would now free itself from the yoke of colonization. Reading the later edition of the same text, published 1969, I imagine the new lines along his eyes as he penned a new epilogue to the book, writing that “the newly independent state was little more than the old imperialist state, only now administered and controlled by the black nationalist.” By this time many anti-colonial struggles were beginning to sag under the weight of bureaucracy, of obsolete European imported institutions, of “flag independence” and neo-colonial subjugation under Black faces. James—and multitudinous others—held firm, imagined more for all unfree Black peoples, believed in the new formations to come.
The artists, radicals, the revolutionaries, activists, and visionaries presented alternative ways to orient life and alternative forms of governance that did not come to be, at least not in this timeline. Every attempt to build something else, fashion new forms of global belonging outside of the terrors of capital and empire, was assassinated by Western imperialism, and in many instances, with the support of the national bourgeoisie. Nation collapsed into nation-state. And from Ghana to the Congo to Grenada to Haiti, from Philadelphia to Montreal, each new possibility has been extinguished before our eyes. In the words of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “a home controlled by black people who refuse capitalism is a dream that is too dangerous for reality.”
How could decolonization have wrought freedom while largely leaving intact the colonial state, and all of the violent, carceral institutions that colonialism put in place: the police force, the prison, and the border guard? Black liberation was never and could never have been fully achieved within these confines, which are so hostile to collectivity, so reliant on hierarchical forms of sovereign power, so antithetical to human life. Especially not for those who are “out”—to think with Lorde—by any construct, wherever the power lay.
Black queer, trans and gender non-conforming folks’ very lives—the preservation and the protection and the proliferation of our bodies and our imaginations and our ontologies: these are not possible on the terms set out by the nation-state.
We are left instead with the husk of freedom struggles past: the colonial and carceral nation-state endured. And so, nation-state thinking threatens, always, to stunt our imaginative and speculative capacities.
Our freedom will not take place as a triumphant entrance into the nation-state, and there is nothing to be celebrated when we join the ranks of its murderous institutions. This rejection is generative and propels us into new forms of living.
To riff on Derek Walcott, My only nation is the imagination. And yet I have a responsibility, too, to the place where I live. To you, and the nations, not nation-states, within which I reside. Here on stolen land, creating places for belonging, insisting that Black peoples belong here as much as we do anywhere, this is not the same as asking to belong to the nation-state. It is not the same, or rather it does not need to be, and ought not be the same, as vying for equality, inclusion, “settler adjacency,” to think with Zoé Samudzi and William C. Anderson, in a nation-state that is hostile to Black and Indigenous life. Because as much as this place accords no value to my own life, the Canadian state, as you and Audra Simpson have both illustrated so clearly, requires violence against Indigenous women, as part of the dispossession of the land. This is what she means when she writes that “the state is a man.” Her work, and yours, illuminated for me that dispossession relies on an asymmetrically gendered violence: of lands, peoples, and the attempted eradications of knowledge systems. I want to belong otherwise, on altogether different terms.
Leanne, how are we going to live? There’s no going back. But because we continue the work of our ancestors to work for new timelines, new kinds of homespace outside of capital; we take up the visionary love work of worldmaking that we’ve inherited from our predecessors, even as we imbue their freedom dreams with new meanings.
For now-departed Lorde, for you and I, for so many other queer, radical, Black, Indigenous peoples, the knowledge that we are “out—by any construct” of state power is a valuable site of knowledge, from which to develop a shared politics.
Of course, this is a kind of conjure-work: to refuse the state that refuses you. Because it is not only a rejection, but an act that is geared toward liberated presents and futures. As outlaws of this nation-state, Black and Indigenous communities, especially those on the far reaches of the power structures inside our communities, are uniquely poised to develop a shared politic based on an expansive protection of life, an expansive protection of the outlaw, to make emancipatory claims that go well beyond the formal equalities that we are continually proffered and just as continually denied.
And this is, of course, what is happening right now. The turbulent urgencies of this time are making clear that new kinds of governance are on the horizon, new futures being mapped in the present.
Cree-Métis-Saulteaux author and art curator Jas Morgan describes in Canadian Art how the arrest of Anne Spice, an Indigenous queer writer, at the Unist’ot’en camp sparked a new orientation of Indigenous radicalism, led by queer Indigenous young people, leading to the phrase that has defined the next phase of this movement: #ReconciliationIsDead.
By which Morgan meant that the “reconciliation” extended three years after the emergence of Idle No More, with the publication of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report in 2015—and intended to be promise of a “new relationship” between Canada and Indigenous peoples—was a lie, and would now be treated as such.
Spice, as told to Jas Morgan, says this:
We’re in this highly destructive system, and it’s built on heteropatriarchy. It’s built on colonialism. And breaking out of that means having the imagination to think through other alternatives. For queer people and for Indigenous people alike, we’re already living those alternatives. And so the constructive project of building a different world is something that we’re already practicing. It’s not just saying “no” to the pipelines. We’re engaged in that world-building project already. And I think that’s what draws us to land defence. We know we need to protect the territory, but we also need to build something else that’s going to continue to feed our relations into the future.
To build something else.
#ReconciliationIsDead holds lessons for us all, in which queer, young Indigenous peoples’ demand for the return of land and an end to violent extraction, their seeking of not new or better relationships with the state, but to build something else, extends a promise for a future on different terms.
I learned from Ojore Lutalo, who spent twenty-eight years in a New Jersey state prison, that “we are our own liberators. We have to define our own reality.” Leanne, I’m with you here: we deserve forms of homespace that allow life, in all of its forms, to proliferate. This belief—a shared politic—is what grounds my solidarity with you and yours. It is not contingent on reciprocity. I will forever choose to align, politically, with those who would continue to work toward liberated territories, bodies, lives, and homespaces, in whatever form that takes. Against any form of governance that relies on land dispossession, that renders some of us criminal, alien, or forced to the constitutive outside of belonging.
I believe in forging a shared politic. Undergirded by the knowledge, and belief, that “where life is precious, life is precious,” and forging political solidarities to value life. I believe in forging a politic that is centred, too, on the multi-valent needs of those who least have access to a livable life. We start from here and move outward.
I believe that I am able, that we are able, to commit together to demanding the impossible because we are steeped in old-new, future-oriented political traditions that show us that there is nothing inevitable about the present, that it need not be permanent. We are able to demand alternative timelines because consciousness is born of generations of struggle, because we are so very fortunate to come from political traditions of radicalism that are collective, and communal, that are against accumulation and individualism. These not only expose the lie of Western historiography but offer a vastly expansive vision that is so much richer than the death cult that is proffered by a white supremacist society.
Abolition is imagination work, anti-colonial struggle is imagination work, conjure work, science fiction in real time. It is daring to see that the world now did not need to be as it was, does not need to be as it is, and certainly, most importantly, need not—will not—remain this way. It is too much justice, re-imagining and refashioning governance as abundance rather than enclosure. The timelines being forwarded by the land return projects of the hosts of the Métis in Space podcast, the Métis futurisms sketched out by Chelsea Vowel’s writing, Camille Turner’s Afronautic Research Lab, and the reparations struggle of Lynn Jones and other Black elders in Nova Scotia: all of these sketch out alternative futures right here in the present.
As described in Sun Ra’s Space is the Place: “We live on the other side of time.”
Toward the end of “100 musicians at Jane and Finch?,” despite the insistence of her lover, June hears—she is certain!—the radio announcer saying these words: “The mayor has decided to send one hundred musicians including flautists, guitarists, bassists, saxophonists, drummers and pianists to the Jane-Finch corridor to help curb the violence in the neighborhood. The plan was approved by City Council …” June’s timeline is well underway; her city, her home and world are exponentially expanding outward with possibility.
It’s late summer now, so the stores are open again. Bloor Street West is no longer nearly empty. I prefer, going forward, to linger my thoughts not on the spring/summer as I had planned/hoped it to be, but to choose differently. I hope I can continue to maintain the courage to choose June’s timeline again and again, to maintain a fastidious commitment to believing that there are one hundred otherwise worlds for us to live in, that they are just around the corner, perhaps arriving already, if we listen carefully enough. That there are one hundred ways to manifest the presence of justice in the places it is most absent, one hundred modes of governance that are collective, communal. One hundred worlds for L., for Minowe, for our kids and theirs to grow old in that are free from nation-state, enclosure, private property, and all of the carceral mechanisms in place to protect it. We can be homeless together: and I hope we will continue to dream up well over one hundred ways we could live together, differently, in this place.
I also can’t ever sleep and sometimes I watch so much Star Trek that I start to refer to the characters as my actual friends. Miigwech for your last letter. Sometimes I think your letters are the only good thing in the world. I’ve started reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, alongside some N. K. Jemisin. Oh you are so right. We were warned. Octavia told us.
I also love the exchange you shared between Baldwin and Lorde—her flat-out rejection of the American dream. In the days since you wrote, I’ve carried her rejection with me. She was never part of the American dream. Indigenous peoples were never part of the American dream—our bodies and lands were the resources for white people to build their dream on. I’m trying to think through how Nishnaabeg elders would think about that dream—a dream that from this perspective is flawed from the beginning. Why would one work hard for their own individual benefit? How is that ethical? Doesn’t Nishnaabeg ethics require everyone to work hard, not for themselves but for the collective web of life? How could a people be so broken that their dream of a better life focused only on their individual wealth—at the world-ending expense of so many other living beings? This is exactly Dionne Brand’s question in the face of individual or even collective recognition: how do we change the air? That is such a profound instruction. How do we refuse the recognition, the invitations to perform, the individual validations, the crumbs, and change the thing nearly all living things require, the air?
I come from a society that, prior to colonialism, didn’t have police or the practice of policing—not because we were primitive or simple or nomadic, or because our population was too tiny to need policing, but because Nishnaabeg society was structured and practised in such a way that, for the most part, the violence of policing wasn’t required to maintain social and political relations. For me, the foundations of this way of collective living are spiritual and come from a belief that the spiritual world is alive and animated and interacting with the physical world. Each living being is responsible for its own path in relation to the other living things with whom we share time and space. This means that I’m responsible for monitoring myself and my own behaviours and actions within that matrix of relationals. I’m not at liberty to interfere or judge or surveil the life paths of other living things. Nishnaabeg spiritual practices teach that everything alive also has spirit, and that these spirits are in constant interaction with each other. This means that my ancestors are always around me, as are those yet to be born. This means that I have a relationship to the plants and animals I am dependent upon in the physical world, in the spiritual world. This becomes most prominent during our harvesting practices. In Nishnaabeg society, harvesting animals or plants first requires their consent, and we believe that if the animal appears, it is giving up its physical life and returning to the spiritual world. There are a series of rituals and procedures that, when practised, ensure this transition from the physical world to the spiritual world is done with respect and honouring.
I understand this as an anti-capitalist society in a particularly Nishnaabeg formation. The practices of taking only what you need, using everything you take, sharing everything you have and giving up what you can to promote more life, created a bush economy that gave way to a very different relationship to land and water than the one dictated to us by racial capitalism. Systems of conflict resolution, repair, restorative justice, and building consensus were practised to nurture balance and peace, amongst individuals and groups of people—and not just between and amongst humans, but amongst a diversity of living beings. The idea of authoritarian control in leadership or education was relaxed and even rejected in favour of individual self-determination, consent, and non-interference. Labour, material goods, and the gifts of plants and animals were shared. Of course, things were not always perfect. Abuse, toxicity, and conflict occurred. We know because there are stories. Conflicts sometimes escalated, but the responsibility for creating safe and caring spaces didn’t rest on leaders or institutions; those responsibilities were carried by individuals and families as well as the larger collective. What I learn from the way my ancestors lived life collectively is that if you build systems based on relationality, reciprocity, consent and diversity, if you refuse hierarchy and authoritarian power in both collective and intimate settings, if “laws” are practices embodied in deep relationality rather than rigid authoritarian rules, if “justice” repairs and restores and if your practice of living is also a practice of consent, you eliminate policing.
What I learn from my ancestors is that if you have a profoundly different relationship with land, with the earth—one grounded in diversity and based on consent, sharing, respect, and minimizing one’s impact, instead of mass exploitation of natural resources for the benefit a small group of people willing to exercise authoritarian power— you have a profoundly different relationship to all of life, profoundly different intimate relations, and profoundly different diplomatic relations.
When I speak about Indigenous resurgence and Indigenous self-determination, my vision is to take wisdom and inspiration from my ancestors to actualize Nishnaabeg political formations outside of nation-states, economies outside of extractivism and enclosures of racial capitalism. This means deep connections to land outside of dispossession, and relationships to each other outside of heteropatriarchy. This means abolishing and reconstructing every aspect of life in North America and beyond. It is a reckoning, a complete overturning. A remaking of a Nishnaabeg world.
The vision for the future in this way of thinking is not a fixed map, but a set of ethical practices giving way to continual making and remaking processes without an ending. In my understanding of Nishnaabeg origin stories, not even Gzhe Manidoo knew how to build the world on their first try. It took many engagements in world-building to get it right. The planets in our solar system are examples of their failed prototypes for life. Of course, in our current context we have additional challenges because we are tasked with remaking a world in a place still wholly invested in world-endings. We have been both individually and collectively harmed by four centuries of oppression. There are huge losses in terms of land, knowledge, and practice, and of course not all Indigenous peoples agree, not all Nishnaabeg would share my interpretations or visions. I still find inspiration in my ancestors, and this inspiration only grows when I experience glimpses of this way of living.
How did my community and my nation get from living with very little crime and no police to being gunned down on the streets of Toronto? The short answer is colonialism. The medium-sized answer is that dispossessing Indigenous peoples of our lands and maintaining that system required and requires a complicated and multi-pronged structure of control where direct violence, the threat of direct violence, and symbolic violence, all deployed in a gendered way, are foundational to the construction and maintenance of Canada. The longer, detailed answer is more complicated, because there are variations and specificities of this circuitry in different regions in Canada; as well, the time frame is enormous, particularly for Indigenous peoples in the east and central Canada, and of course the historic record is fraught with bias, racism and the absence of Indigenous experience and perspectives. What follows here, then, is a generalized sketch of what those systems looked like and look like for First Nations in Canada, focusing on the Indian Act and how that act worked in concert with other forces to surveil, control and regulate life for First Nations people.
We need to first take a step back, though. The policing, surveillance and punishment of Indigenous bodies and our relationality actually began long before the first Indian Act. It began at contact, when explorers, missionaries, traders, and translators came into contact with Two-Spirit, queer Nishnaabeg, and those Nishnaabeg who embodied a gender identity outside of the European gender binary. In As We Have Always Done, in a chapter called “Queer Normativity,” I wrote about how, prior to colonization, 2SQ Indigenous peoples flourished in many Indigenous nations and were highly visible to the first European colonizers. I give the example of Ozawendib, an Anishinaabe from Leech Lake who is documented in the historical record as someone whose sexuality, relationship orientation and gender was accepted into Anishinaabeg society as normal, despite it being outside of the norms of European culture. 2SQ people like Ozawendib, who were visible to the Europeans, also quickly became targets of eliminatory violence by missionaries—with Joseph-François Lafitau, a French Jesuit missionary, boasting, in 1724, nearly one hundred years before the advent of residential schools and more than one hundred years before the first Indian Act, that, after seventy-five years of missionary work, 2SQ people were “now looked upon with scorn even by the Indians.” My culture had more than two genders. There was a fluidity around gender, sexual orientation, and relationship orientation. This was a direct threat to the colonizers. And so for Indigenous peoples in Canada, this was the beginning of the policing of our bodies, our sexualities, our relationship orientations, gender, and our society’s queerness.
As I wrote in As We Have Always Done:
[C]olonizers saw in Indigenous people’s bodies—our physical bodies and our constructions of gender, sexuality, and intimate relationships—as Audra Simpson says, as a symbol of Indigenous orders of government and a direct threat to their sovereignty and governmentality. The church, the state, and broader Canadian society worked in concert to surveil and confine Indigenous bodies and intimacies to Euro-Canadian heteropatriarchal marriages, that is, singular, lifelong monogamous relationships designed to reproduce the building blocks of Canadian nationalism instead of the replication of Nishnaabeg worlds [Nishnaabewin and Nishnaabeg nationhoods], while also placing Indigenous conceptualizations and forms of intimacy and relationship as transgressive, immoral, uncivilized, and criminal.
By the time the Indian Act came into being in 1876, queer Indigenous bodies had already been policed and targeted for elimination for a century. The first Indian Act brought existing legislation regarding Indian life under one act, and it was designed to control nearly all aspects of Indian life from the cradle to the grave. I am using the term “Indian” here, although it is considered a racial slur and offensive, for the sake of accuracy because it carries legal meaning in Canada, and that meaning is confined to First Nations people. The term and the act do not include Inuit and Métis people, who have their own unique and important history with the state.
The first Indian Act entrenched the colonial gender binary into our communities by administratively eliminating genders other than male and female. It defined who was Indian and who was not, and therefore decided who was part of the reserve community and who was not. Successive Indian Acts, prior to a mass mobilization by Indigenous women in the 1980s, denied Indian status to Indian women who married white men, but granted Indian status to white women who married Indian men. The racist and sexist thinking at the time was that Indian men would not take care of white women and would need the government assistance that status provided, and that white men could take care of Indian women so they would no longer need the “benefits” Indian status provided. The Indian Act embodied a heteronormativity that rejected unchurched, queer, non-monogamous intimate relationships from reserve communities. Indigenous women who married white men, and their children, were often forced to leave the reserve and to remake their homes without support in urban centres. Queer people were also forced to leave, or to live coded and hidden lives on the reserve, obscuring the surveillance of the church and state.
Early Indian Acts (1876 to the end of World War II) did not stop here. They assisted and created the control mechanisms that enabled residential schools and the practice of state schooling. They created reserves in the southern parts of Canada. They forced people to carry European names, instead of Indigenous ones. They restricted people from leaving the reserve without permission from the Indian agent. They enforced enfranchisement (which stipulated the loss of legal and ancestral identities) of any Indian admitted to university or who served in the army, and of any Indian woman marrying a non-Indigenous man. They allowed Indian agents to lease out First Nations lands to white farmers and to relocate entire communities. They forbade political organizing, the hiring of lawyers, and fundraising to support a legal claim. They denied those who kept their Indian status the right to vote in Canadian elections, forbade some First Nations people from appearing in public wearing regalia, and had the impact of forbidding First Nations people from speaking our languages and practising ceremonies. Indian Acts from 1876 right up until today imposed (sometimes violently, as we’ve seen in the case of Akwesasne) the band council system of administration and “governance”—a system of government that is not founded on our political systems, but is designed so chief and councillors are enmeshed in a colonial administration with limited powers and with direct accountability to the state, not their community members.
Indian Acts placed Indian agents, representatives of the Canadian government, on reserves with the purpose of controlling Indians and enforcing the acts themselves, beginning in the late 1800s. In Canada, Indian agents administered Indian policy and the wishes of the state until the late 1960s. They exerted a tremendous amount of control over Indian people. They could recommend that a chief or councillor be deposed, and they enforced attendance at residential schools. They could dole out rations and the terms of treaty, and they could withhold those same rations and terms as punishment. They controlled Indian movements through the “pass system,” a system of carding in which one needed the written permission of the Indian agent to leave the reserve. They controlled religious and cultural practices, language speaking, gender expression, intimate relationships, and sexuality. They pressured women into the roles of housewives, and men into farming or wage labour. They were to defuse any political organizing and politicization. Clergy, missionaries and the church communities (both non-Indigenous and Indigenous), white settlers, health officials, police and the military worked in concert with Indian agents to report families and individuals not adhering or conforming to colonial values or, in the case of vagrancy and prostitution laws, appearing in white spaces. The Indian Act, Indian agents and their clergy allies were a form of policing that historically had extraordinary powers in the regulation and surveillance and punishment of Indian life in order to maintain dispossession. The Indian Act was often enforced by police and the criminal justice system, and even low-level officials in the Department of Indian Affairs often had the power of life or death over Indian people.
And it wasn’t just the Indian Act and Indian agents policing Indigenous life.
The dispossession of First Nations and Métis peoples from their homelands on the prairies and plains of western Canada from the early 1700s to the late 1800s provides us with a clear, well documented and horrific account of the multi-faceted violence of colonialism and of the strength and resistance of prairie Indigenous peoples. The settlement of this region was predicated on a tremendous loss of Indigenous life, and a tremendous loss of ecological life. There were a series of devastating epidemics and pandemics over this period—European infectious disease played a crucial role in weakening Indigenous nations and Indigenous resistance and eliminating Indigenous life. Racial capitalism was introduced in the form of the extractivist fur trade, at first working within the bounds of Indigenous economies, and then overwhelming those economies as enormous practices of greed took over, leading to more systems of control to secure trade. Animal populations collapsed; environmental degradation was normalized. The influx of settlers demanding land for farming, the construction of the railway, the decline of the bison, and extreme, imposed poverty and starvation were the context within which treaties and the Métis scrip system were actualized. The creation of reserves, together with the Indian Act’s pass system, amounted to a form of mass incarceration for those First Nations people who were able to survive. Throughout this history, there are also many examples of First Nations and Métis resistance, sometimes large-scale and armed, sometimes in the notes of those witnessing treaty negotiations and always in the oral traditions of those peoples. Indigenous children were being kidnapped by the state and held in residential schools, which seems a lot like the state using Indigenous children as human shields, to quell Indigenous resistance while also “removing the Indian from the child.”
Before police forces were established in Canada, policing was violently present in Indigenous life in administration, policy, law, social work, education, housing, religion, and health care, and that policing was there to remove, separate, and contain Indigenous peoples from land.
All of this is to say that by the time the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) was formed in 1873 by then Prime Minister John A. Macdonald as a paramilitary organization, the practice of violently dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their lands in the prairies was already a century old. The NWMP and later the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were created to “assist with conflicts” between Indigenous peoples and settlers and facilitate a smooth transfer of Indigenous land to the colonizers; in other words, their purpose was to remove Indigenous peoples from their territories, and confine them to reserves. A full understanding of the history of policing in Canada and the United States and its current practice requires an understanding of the evolution of this system with regard to both Indigenous and Black peoples and our experiences with slavery and colonialism.
While many of the most restrictive measures in the Indian Act were removed in the 1951 amendments, the act still remains intact, particularly in terms of membership and governance, as do the attitudes and beliefs that propelled the colonial scaffolding in the first place. The legacy of these historic systems continues today, intensely, on the prairies with the murder of Colten Boushie and the acquittal of the Gerald Stanley, the white farmer who killed him, in remote and northern communities where missionaries are actively trying to convert people to fundamentalist forms of Christianity, and in cities where over-policing and over-incarceration of Indigenous peoples is an eliminator violence that has killed many Indigenous people in the recent past. The results of these historic systems continue today when police are deployed to blockades and land reclamation sites.
A cruel and enduring system of control has also been enacted on Indigenous children and their families. This won’t surprise any Indigenous parents. This week, APTN News reported that in the last four months in Ontario, eleven Indigenous children have died while connected to the child welfare system. There is, and has been since the beginning of the residential school era, an epidemic of Indigenous child apprehension by the state. There are currently more Indigenous children in care than at the height of the residential school system, with 90 percent of the kids in care in Manitoba, as an example, being Indigenous. We know the outcomes of the foster care system are horrific: 60 percent of homeless youth and one-third of homeless adults have come from foster care. White middle-class social workers have wielded extreme amounts of control over Indigenous families for generations, with very little accountability. We have over twenty thousand survivors of the Sixties Scoop—a time period in which white middle-class social workers removed thousands of children from Indigenous homes, often from stable and loving families, and placed them in adopted white families. This is the direct result of social workers and the state policing Indigenous mothering and parenting, and a direct result of imposed poverty of dispossession and the intergenerational trauma caused by residential schools.
Destroying Indigenous families through sexualized violence, poverty, residential schools, the child welfare system and over-policing prevents our people from being able to launch effective resistance mobilizations to protect our lands from extractivist resource development. So much effort in colonial societies goes towards violently breaking the bond between Indigenous peoples and our homelands.
The final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls talks about policing as an institution that worked in concert with other colonial institutions to exert total colonial control over Indigenous peoples. Colonial control over relationships, gender expression and sexuality was surveilled and monitored through the church, residential and day schools, and Indian agents. Nishnaabeg society, for instance, which as I’ve mentioned embraced many genders, relationship orientations and sexual orientations, was controlled by the imposition of a strict gender binary and hierarchy and of “churched relationships”—heterosexual, monogamous relationships. This “total control” was key in enabling sexual abuse and in the perpetuation of the racist and gendered stereotypes at the root of the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.
It wasn’t just police forces like the RCMP that surveilled, controlled and policed Indigenous bodies and our homespaces. This racialized control is carried out by clergy, church communities, health care workers, teachers, social workers, companies and corporations, farmers and white people in general. Policing, in all its formations, is a foundational part of the violent system of control and subjugation that is colonialism, and it is not confined to those who wear uniforms, carry guns and murder Black and Indigenous people struggling with mental illness, poverty and substance use. It is work that white settlers willingly take on, as we witnessed in the trial of Gerald Stanley. We’ve also recently seen it closer to home in Orillia, Ontario, when two white people called the police when they witnessed a First Nations man fall off his bike, resulting in two Nishnaabeg brothers being attacked and assaulted by officers as a result of that call.
Several years ago, motivated by the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls and—though this is too often overlooked, Two-Spirit and queer people—I sought out a deeper understanding of abolition through the writings of Black feminists. I sought out the writings of radical Black feminists from below because I was personally frustrated with the catastrophic loss of Indigenous life, the police and state’s response, and the narrative taken up in the media and popular culture about Indigenous women in general, and those who are murdered and eliminated in particular. I found it disgusting to watch Canada consume the grief and trauma of families who had lost loved ones. I also found the gendered nature of the diagnosis, its erasure of queer bodies and reinforcement of a colonial gender binary, problematic—an impression that was bolstered by the critical analysis of the carceral state being done by so many Black abolition feminists. After immersing myself in Black abolition writing and the women of the Black Radical Tradition—writers like Angela Y. Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, and Saidiya Hartman, all of whom you have mentioned in your letters, I began to ask how it was that colonial gendered violence was disproportionately filling up prisons with Indigenous people, and that police were disproportionately murdering Indigenous peoples. I became interested in the fact that there are also alarming numbers of missing and murdered Black women, girls and queer people, and that the police are disproportionately murdering Black people. From this lens, my understandings of colonial and anti-Black violence in the afterlives of slavery became more rigorous, layered, nuanced and complete, and these broadened understandings pointed to a different organizing pathway.
Indigenous women and Two-Spirit and queer people have been organizing around the crisis of MMIWG2SQ for decades, pressing governments to take action, supporting grieving families, pressing for police reforms, and demanding justice. I am grateful to the countless Indigenous women and queer folks who have built this movement and done decades of thankless work to make the world a safer place for me and my daughter. And certainly, one of the tangible results of this work was the state’s National Inquiry on MMIWG. The “Calls for Justice” in the final section of the report were also remarkable in calling for the state to engage in the wider systemic change required to lessen the violence load on Indigenous women and Two-Spirit and queer people by addressing issues around cultural regeneration, poverty, the child welfare system, health and wellness, human security, particularly in the sex industry, the role of extractivist and development industries, reforms in prisons, policing and the criminal justice system. Of course we know this work is never done with a government’s final report. We know we have to go far beyond these recommendations. We know there is a huge gulf between the state’s intentions and actions and the Calls for Justice. We also know from our past experiences with royal commissions and national inquiries, that these Calls for Justice will go largely ignored, particularly the ones demanding systemic change. Unless our movements are able to move our agenda forward, the murdering will continue.
The work of Andrea J. Ritchie in Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color is crucial here in reminding Indigenous peoples that police and policing are never going to be a solution to the crisis of MMIWG2SQ. Ritchie emphasizes that policing is premised on punishment and authoritarian power, and was and is designed to control Black and Indigenous bodies in maintenance of racial capitalism and the settler state.
What is clear to me from the writings and actions of Black abolition feminists is that to eliminate the crisis of killing of Indigenous women and girls, and Two-Spirit and queer people, we need a shift in the focus of organizing from individual harm to collective and systemic change. From this perspective, we must eliminate, not reform the police. We must as, Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, change everything. We must eliminate the structures and conditions that created this crisis in the first place. We must go further than a government report designed on a macro-level to gut Indigenous resistance by gesturing towards change, but never implementing it. We need to reclaim Indigenous territoriality outside the nation-state, and to build an economy outside of the offerings of racial capitalism. We need to build an Indigenous movement of “feminist-inflected internationalism that highlights the value of queer theories and practices.”
We need to create the conditions where the lives of Indigenous and Black women and Two-Spirit, trans, and queer people are precious; where all living things are precious.
Bringing the movement to end MMIWG2SQ in conversation with the work of Black abolition feminists creates a number of what-if questions, to my mind. What if Black and Indigenous families had safe housing, food, drinking water, education, and health care, free from anti-Indigenous racism? What if Black and Indigenous communities, both urban and reserve, had access to mental-health care from the best of both Western and Indigenous practices? What if all Black and Indigenous families had access to community-based and community-led twenty-four-hour childcare programs and programs that assist parents in developing culturally appropriate parenting skills? What if we were committed to repairing the damage caused through dispossession, residential schools, and the child welfare system and regenerating Indigenous families on Indigenous terms? What if we were committed to repairing the damage of slavery and its anti-Black afterlives? What if we did this work together, instead of begging the state?
In my own homeland as you know better than I do, movements for Black life including Black Lives Matter Toronto continue to work towards abolition with a list of demands that ranges from defunding and demilitarizing the police to decriminalizing poverty. Every single demand will make the lives of Indigenous peoples in Toronto and beyond better. Every single demand towards defunding the police could save the lives of Indigenous Two-Spirit and queer people. Every single demand addresses the issue of MMIWG, and represents movement towards abolition. This platform does more in my mind to regenerate Indigenous communities and mitigate the trauma of colonialism than reconciliation or any state offering.
I’ve thought about the last section of the demands— “Create Alternatives”—the most, asking the questions, What do Indigenous peoples need in order to recreate societies that have no need for police and policing, and how do these needs drive the undoing of racial capitalism? This has become an interesting way of thinking about abolition through a Nishnaabeg lens.
We need clean drinking water in all of our communities. We need consent, sex, gender and violence education in the school curriculum, and free health care clinics. We need expanded midwifery services in homes and hospitals and remote communities so people can give birth surrounded by their loved ones and in a culturally appropriate manner. We need breast-feeding advocates and support workers. We need living income for all, and expanded parental leaves for people with all kinds of work. We need all of our parents to have access to culturally relevant parenting resources and supports, including free, twenty-four-hour childcare. We need well- funded, culturally relevant schools on reserves and in urban centres with Indigenous teachers. We need language learning opportunities, on par with French-language instruction in English Canada, for all Indigenous languages. We need food security. We need community-based programs that breathe life into bush economies and support Indigenous peoples being on the land, harvesting food and sharing those gifts with the community. We need the state and its social workers to stop apprehending Indigenous children into the child welfare system. We need an end to racial capitalism and global warming and the extermination of our plant and animal relatives.
Saidiya Hartman writes that “[t]he possessive investment in whiteness can’t be rectified by learning ‘how to be more antiracist.’ It requires a radical divestment in the project of whiteness and a redistribution of wealth and resources. It requires abolition, the abolition of the carceral world, the abolition of capitalism. What is required is a remaking of the social order, and nothing short of that is going to make a difference.”
Now, this might deal with a large chunk of practical social issues and issues of inequality stemming from colonialism, but it does not necessarily deal with the things that my people usually mobilize over—land and self-determination. Indigenous nations and communities need substantial land bases where we have the ability to say no to resource extraction. We need to be able to decide how to govern ourselves without state interference. Without resolutions to these two fundamental and related issues, the state will still need to deploy the military and police forces into our communities in order to control our governance and decision making and to protect their interests in the resources in our homelands. In the face of global climate change and its amplification of inequality, states that chose to continue on extermination courses will also need the military and police forces to protect their interests. Indigenous peoples will continue to mobilize against deforestation, environmental contamination, pipelines and the oil and gas industry, mining, fish farms, and any other industrialized development taking place on our lands without our consent.
Manu Karuka makes the argument that Black and Indigenous movements for self-determination have long critiqued the colonial/racial state and that these critiques offer sites where Indigenous and Black thought and politics can productively interact with each other, working independently and in concert towards shared ends, building capacities for futures beyond state power.
Karuka asks us to pay attention to the idea that Blackness has developed in relation to Indigenous presence. “To ignore this historical and structural relationship is one way to deny accountability across distinct claims to self-determination, in which black liberation in place is framed through the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples.” Karuka then quotes Audra Simpson, making the point that colonialism has not been successful in that Indigenous peoples still exist and we have not been absorbed into a “white, property-owning body politic.” Karuka suggests that settler colonialism’s failure, then, “might potentially be a fulcrum for Black liberation.”
Our movements and our communities come from different experiences and histories with genocide. They are informed by different theoretical positions and meaning-making practices, and while the results of colonialism and transatlantic slavery might place our peoples’ struggles—with poverty, with mental health and substance-use issues, with insecure housing and food systems—in a linked formation, our political struggles and historic resistances are different.
This difference is a strength.
Certain formations of Nishnaabeg nationhood and self-determination have the potential to be a mechanism that supports, philosophically, ethically, and materially, radical Black freedom through mutual accountability and deep reciprocity. I believe that we are best served with movements and theoretical foundations and bodies of knowledge that centre anti-colonial struggle in the global theatre. I know that real change takes tremendous amounts of work and successive mobilizations by waves of peoples. Defunding the police and the policing of Indigenous and Black people, then, is a huge part of undoing the system of colonialism in Canada. It must be part of the calculus of our anti-colonial organizing.
I want to build societies where we take care of the land and the waters and live in a way that promotes more life. I want to live in a way that doesn’t cause the extinction of vast numbers of plants and animals, where environmental desecration isn’t inevitable. Where extractivist economies are not the norm and where capitalism is not assumed to be permanent. Where there are communal and embodied ethics and practices that make slavery and colonialism unthinkable, where one hundred musicians show up at busy intersections and no one is surprised.