“We Are Peoples of the Lands,
of More Lands Than Could
Ever Be Counted”
I’ve been delaying this letter because I was waiting for the right words to come my way. A few days ago, I finally heard the words that helped me to articulate my response to you. This happened while I was roasting a chicken, of all the things, which I had soaked in a seasoned brine overnight.
As a sidebar, this is an absurd amount of food, really, for one person. But given my newly single status since the pandemic began, I was proud of myself. Was feeling like a butch and a boss in the kitchen, in life. (I take great satisfaction in making small parts of my life symbolic.) But this is otherwise beside the point. Because what is more important than what I was cooking is that while I was cooking, I was watching a documentary about Ousmane Sembène, the Senegalese anti-colonial novelist and filmmaker. It was grainy and slightly difficult to follow, as the film had been pirated onto YouTube, but brilliant, nonetheless. Something that he said jumped out at me, made me interrupt the cooking process, wash and dry my hands so that I could scroll the film backwards and take note. In this particular scene Sembène is sitting at a table, wearing dark sunglasses, at what appears to be an outdoor café. In response to a question about Europe’s colonization of Africa, he answers this, about the colonizers: “They’ve never invented anything to make earth habitable. Everything they do is to destroy the land.” After this, he gestures, silently. The interviewer, in turn, gestures silently. After a long pause, the scene closes. What more needed to be said, anyways?
Everything they do is to destroy the land.
I’ve leaned in for a few days now to your gentle but firm insistence that the abolition of police and prisons must be a pillar of decolonization, and that Indigenous land-based struggles could/should/must be considered within what abolition demands of us. #LandBack. Land. Back. In this crisis of the earth’s habitability, your words are pushing me to think more extensively about abolition and land. About my own responsibility to you, to the place that I live. Your words are a necessary reminder that, in addition to the role of policing in enforcing Black people’s unfreedom (and perpetuating an economy that relies on a multitude of unfreedoms), policing has always served, and serves, still, to sever Indigenous peoples from their lands, from non-capitalist ways of relating to land and to all other non-human relations. That policing functions in the service of those who destroy the land. That one opposite of policing is Land Back, which is, after all, an end to the imposition of private property regimes and the carceral technologies developed to enforce them.
Everything they do is to destroy the land. Indeed: aren’t all carceral sites and technologies, at some level, really, about cementing the theft of the land, to cement its (purported) transformation into capital, for some colonizer somewhere? Ingrid Waldron’s work details the twin criminalization of African Nova Scotian and Mi’kmaw peoples on the east coast, alongside and in parallel to the environmental devastation of their communities. Africville, Lincolnville, North and East Preston, alongside Eskasoni First Nation, Millbrook First Nation, and Acadia First Nation, as she highlights, are places where the state targets our communities for incarceration, and where large companies facilitate our ongoing economic plunder. And so, as we enter a crisis of the earth’s vulnerability, I do not see a contradiction between Black-led abolitionist struggles against carcerality and the Indigenous struggle for white settlers to rescind their purported ownership of land. Instead, I see a site where struggles can/should/must/do overlap.
This is partly because within Turtle Island and across the Black global south, prison serves, everywhere, among other things, toward the destruction of the land. For the colonizer, for the multinational corporation (these are not necessarily distinct in a meaningful way.) Because not just settler colonialism, but all colonization was itself a project of land theft. As written in 1900 in the Lagos Observer, “Forcible concessions of land in places where there are any prospects of vegetable or mineral wealth, and oppressive Lands Bills have left the Natives of the soil hardly any control over their ancestral possessions.” To hold and keep African territories and peoples under European control, colonizers built substantial networks of prisons, with technologies perfected in the coastal forts built for the slave trade, and with technologies of forcible confinement and constraint that were developed over centuries of Black enslavement. In Kenya, the settler colonial government, as part of a broader program of brutal and spectacular forms of violence, used detention to cement the process of massive land grabs that extended from 1890 onward. (And if you were wondering: this violence was tacitly and at times formally supported, as most global violences are, by Canada: former RCMP officer John Timmerman was the assistant to the chief of police during the anti-colonial uprisings.) This land theft continued into the so-called independence era, now at the behest of the neo-colonial rulers. This practice was satirized in a play (that took to task, as well, other neo-colonial hypocrisies) by Ngugi wa Thiong’o. And prison continued to serve its same purpose: for levelling this critique, Thiong’o was duly placed in detention in the nation’s Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. They could not, however, hold his mind captive: he published a series of prison writings that would have him join the ranks of Wole Soyinka, George Simeon Mwase, and J. M. Kariuki, entering a tradition of incarcerated African radicals who would write freedom from spaces of captivity. Who were punished for dreaming, among other freedom dreams, of how land could be held, lived, owned, shared, otherwise.
Everything they do is to destroy the land. In Haiti, the Lavalas movement undertook educational and labour reforms and a radical project of land redistribution for the mass of Haiti’s landless peasants, with broad popular support. And, of course, was overthrown by a coup d’état orchestrated by the governments of Canada, the US, and France in 2003. The land program, and all the other moves toward ending privatization and mass impoverishment, was thrown out by the brutal puppet government of Gérard Latortue, installed by the coup leaders. This government would go on to police and incarcerate those who had deigned to organize land and life otherwise, with Canadian “aid” money funding, and providing training for, Haitian police and prisons. I think that few Canadians realize just how substantively their country’s carceral practices extend beyond its national borders. In so many instances the same police forces that we are protesting here are used to uphold a global economy of racial and gendered subordination (headlines like this one: “Quebec police officers engaged in sexual misconduct in Haiti,” have not made waves in the broader discourse). And yet the RCMP, the Montreal Police Services, and the Correctional Service of Canada are all Canadian exports which serve to contain and confine much of the Haitian population, preventing Haitian peoples from adopting less oppressive forms of land ownership and less exploitative labour practices.
Everything they do is to destroy the land.
Of course, they also destroy much more than this. Western imperialism in the global Black world, anti-Black violence past and present—these are not only matters of the land. Black peoples’ bodily and ontological sovereignty matters; who “owns” our labour and the products of our labour matters. And, land matters. These are not unrelated matterings.
Robin D. G. Kelley writes, speaking to the context of settler colonialism on the African continent, “they wanted the land and the labor, but not the people—that is to say, they sought to eliminate stable communities and their cultures of resistance.” This includes, he notes, the “metaphysical and material relations of people to land, culture, spirit, and each other.” All forms of life are homogenized for transformation into capital, into surplus value. Particularly those for whom life is lived in/as the afterlife of property. And still, other ways of knowing and relating to land, to all living things outside of capital, are subject to policing and criminalization, from Wet’suwet’en to Port-au-Prince to Soweto. And all of this, so often funded by Canadian tax dollars.
Abolition and the land, these are issues that we cannot separate here or anywhere.
Everything they do is to destroy the land. And so ongoing Black radical struggle forges and maintains a multitude of alternative, non-exploitative relationships to the land, beyond and outside and against the brutalities of capital. The protection of ecosystems and the earth is at the forefront of many Black struggles: in North Preston, Nova Scotia; on the Honduran North Coast; in the Niger Delta of Nigeria, where the Ijaw Youth Council worked, in 1999, to forward an environmental awareness campaign called “Operation Climate Change.” Tanzanian independence leader and anti-colonial nationalist Julius Nyerere stated that “the foreigners introduced … the concept of land as a marketable commodity” to Indigenous African societies in the lands that came to be deemed Tanzania. Decolonization wrote new relationships to land. Burkinabé revolutionary Thomas Sankara made this link explicit, tying African revolutionary struggle to care for the land. At the Silva Forest Foundation’s first international conference in Paris, in 1986, speaking to the encroachment of the Sahel desert in Burkina Faso, itself the result of mass colonial plunder and deforestation, Sankara spoke these words: “This struggle to defend the trees and the forest is first and foremost a struggle against imperialism. Because imperialism is the arsonist of our forests and savannahs.” Black women, especially, have been at the forefront of land defence. Black women in South Africa, organizing under the name Sikhala Sonke, for example, led support for the 2012 miners against the British-owned platinum mines in South Africa’s minerals-energy complex at Marikana. They took aim, not only at the Lonmin company, but at the World Bank, fighting against both intolerable labour conditions as well as the massive ecological destruction wrought by finance capital and extractive industry. And for this, of course, as always, they faced carceral retribution. As Winona LaDuke writes, though: “In a time when the rights of corporations override the rights of humans, stay human, and remember that the law must be changed.”
Everything they do is to destroy the land. And still, Black peoples, if continually made homeless by capital, forge and have forged relationships with land, despite and against ongoing displacement.
After sitting with the works of the late Caribbean surrealist and Negritude writer Suzanne Césaire, I scribbled this note in the margin my writing book: “We are peoples of the lands, of more lands than could ever be counted.” I read these words out loud to L. sometimes, because I like the way that they feel, because they feel comfortable on my tongue. “We are people of the lands, of more lands than could ever be counted.” I want him to know the multiple lands he can trace his ancestry to, and hold a connection with, and I want him to understand the histories of the lands that he resides on. To me, that involves teaching him about the soil, about the plants, about the snails, about how we respect living things, how we are part of this world that we inhabit.
Some of this is small things, the day-to-day. Many of these small things, as it turns out, involve me pretending that I’m not a wimp. Me holding back my urge to scream when we pull from the soil a cabbage that is filled with massive grey slugs. Me, resisting all of the forces inside me that are driving me to kill the massive (and honestly, terrifying) spider at the bottom of the staircase. Me, instead, naming the spider Winston, and casually—or so it would seem— saying, “What’s up, Winston?” every time we saunter down there for bath time.
And yet the bigger picture, too, of a more serious nature, has its own simplicity. It is part of my work to help him connect to living things, to land, to the place we call our home. To do so, I teach L. how white settlers only purport to own all of these lands. How these lands were in fact violently stolen from peoples who had lived here for thousands of years. Were stolen from people who are here, still. I teach him, too, that many of these same peoples purported to own us, too. That many would purport to own us, still. That our lives are governed, in fact, by many logics that mean nothing to us but nonetheless have deadly repercussions for us when ignored. That there are other ways that this land has been held, loved, and tended. That we, too, are people of lands, more lands than could ever be counted, even if our family has only spent two generations on these ones. That our peoples—Black peoples here—have loved and tended and held kinship relationships to the lands beneath our feet. And that the homespace we inhabit is a land of water protectors, land protectors, whose struggle is in more ways than one our own. And this is how #LandBack is part of my COVID-19 home-school, part of our gardening lesson, however clumsily I may impart it.
And so, yes, to make a short story long, I agree with you, that abolition and Land Back are interlocking projects. They are transnational projects, too, in service of the liberation of earth and its peoples from the throes of capital, toward the end of all forms of captivity.
Because that is what is happening here: they are holding captive an ailing planet. They are ramping up extraction even as the earth is fighting back, and they are criminalizing all of those who would deign to take the side of the earth. The side of the living.
Everything they do is to destroy the land.
It is not only us who see these connections, but those who deign to rule us. As our communities map, more clearly every day, the connections in our struggles to build a world free from land dispossession, environmental degradation, police, prisons, and national borders, Western leaders appear to be committed to intensifying this devastation at every turn, on every front!
They forge their own solidarities. Since the pandemic began, Doug Ford has not only vowed more spending on jails and police. He also used the public health State of Emergency to suspend, between April and June of 2020, environmental protections including Ontario’s Environmental Bill of Rights, and by July had passed law that further weakened the already-too- fragile protections in the Environmental Assessment Act. And the carceral state upholds the earth’s devastation: Haldimand-Norfolk MPP Toby Barrett tweeted that protestors could face mischief charges for occupying the site of a proposed land development on Six Nations territory, where protestors have renamed a site of an intended housing construction, aptly, 1492 Land Back Lane.
If we do not explicitly link our struggles to end carceral controls and our struggles in the service of the earth, they will cage us and call it “climate action.”
Of course, this is already occurring. As the Prison Ecology Project has documented, prisons and detention centres are themselves sites of mass environmental toxicity. And yet the state response is a perverse co-option of habitability, which excludes the protection of human life and suggests that the solution is to build a greener cage. Justin Piché, a prof at the University of Ottawa and a dear comrade in anti-prison struggle, has written about how prison expansion in Canada is increasingly marketed as “green” and sustainable: “Designing a prison to be more sustainable,” he writes, “reinforces the belief that imprisonment is a sustainable solution to criminalized harms.” According to a 2017 schematic report, a new immigration detention centre being built at the behest of the federal government is slated to be built to LEED standards, employing low-voltage lighting and made of recycled materials and wood sourced from Forest Stewardship Council–certified forests. The iron bars of the windows are designed to be covered—on the outside, mind you—in foliage.
And here, even with our communities on the forefront of a global struggle against environmental devastation, we are disappeared, in the greening of captivity. And here the state rebrands carceral tactics as “green” while recycling the practice of racial punishment and captivity, all the while extracting ceaselessly and by any means necessary. And at the same time, of course, it is prisoners who are most vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis. During the massive heat waves of July 2018 in Canada’s Atlantic provinces, the women’s wing of Nova Scotia’s largest jail was not equipped with air conditioning, leading to horrific conditions inside. In a prison strike that occurred a month later as part of the Black August uprisings, Black prisoners denounced the health threats of that summer’s heat waves, and tied their protest to broader crises at hand. In their statement, dictated to El Jones, they wrote: “we recognize that the injustices we face in prison are rooted in colonialism, racism and capitalism.” This is what is at stake in our struggles, which are necessarily overlapping, as they try to shove these so-called green initiatives down our throats.
And so, in a crisis of the earth’s viability, to struggle in support of living things, rather than to side with death—is there any other option? The ethical imperative of abolition asks us, too, as Black folks, to think about land, we people of more lands than can ever be counted, to fight against both dispossession from land and the destruction of land, wherever it appears, and from wherever we stand.
To me this means that as we struggle against the environmental racism faced by our own communities across these lands, we must, too, uphold the land-based struggle of the Wet’suwet’en. Of 1492 Land Back Lane at Six Nations. Of the Sikhala Sonke, and the Garifuna peoples. And, too, the Palestinians under siege in the West Bank and Gaza; the landless farmer under Modi’s rule in India.
There are better ways to be in relation with one another and with the land.
I find it helpful to remember that Europeans, too, had their own relationships to lands. They colonized themselves, of course, before they ventured out to the rest of us. And they were not unified; they had created their own n*ggers and Indians on the continent before they left and projected those features onto us. Their expropriation of European peasants from the land, its subsequent devastation: the destruction of the commons is their own ghost, from whose haunting they have not yet emerged.
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this to you, but I have been gardening for the first time. I have the great fortune of renting the first floor of an affordable (for Toronto), if rundown and slightly mouldy, house with a backyard—a rarity in Toronto these days. In late spring, I planted squash, corn, and beans. I was taught to plant this combination of vegetables by Candace Esquimaux, who every year, near the Humber River, teaches the land-based programming for Black and Afro-Indigenous Freedom School kids (and, by proxy, their parents). I still had no idea what I was doing as I covered the planting area with compost and embedded the seeds, supplementing my learnings with wikiHow, one centimetre deep into the soil. The corn was immediately eaten by squirrels, despite my best efforts.
Yet now that the full heat and humidity of summer is here, the massive leaves of the squash plant have climbed up and around the yard, have taken over the spaces I had tentatively allotted to flowers. They have climbed up my small square of patio and captured my bike, have woven into my rusty barbeque, rendering it, for now, unusable—but I don’t mind. I would never have imagined that so much lush, leafy greenery was part of producing these dense and chubby root vegetables. The vines from the bean plants climbed up the walls of the house; it took me a while to catch on that actual beans were growing, hidden as they were behind the leaves. They were mysterious to me for the first few weeks when they started coming in, until my son pointed out their presence to me. Despite my elderly Portuguese neighbours inexplicably burning their garbage in their barbeque twice a week, making the outdoor space less than palatable at times, this unexpected urban savannah that I’ve somehow facilitated serves as a reminder that I am part of and reside not only in a city, but on living planet. In a mini-ecosystem of me, L., these plants, and the skunks and racoons that live in the landlord’s shed behind my house. This has helped remind me, too, that I am people of lands, that if everything they do is to destroy the land, I can choose, still, an alternate path: to support a return to forms of land stewardship that are amenable to a habitable earth. To render things habitable once again, in the human sense, as well—no settlers or cages. #LandBack.
It is, anyways, in looking into this swath of unchecked and improvised plant life that has exploded across my small square of yard, that I can listen to the vegetation. The curling vines seem to whisper quietly that we can shake off these brutal, if enduring forms of land valuation. That the land’s value has, can, and will again be divorced from the violence of surplus value and the other ignoble measures of our times. As I carefully remove the aphids from the leaves of the green beans pressed against my crumbling red brick walls, they murmur, with words barely audible under the sounds of the traffic on Bloor: For the earth to live, capitalism must die.
It is getting to be harvesting time. If I thought there was a realistic chance of us seeing one another face to face anytime soon, I would set aside one of the squash for you. I would offer this small gesture of the earth’s gifts so that we could feed our families together with some of the products of the summer of revolt, and let this nourish us for the difficult months ahead.
In the beginning of the pandemic, I travelled to Cleveland, Ohio to an event at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I was participating in a group exhibition called Temporary Spaces of Joy and Freedom, curated by La Tanya S. Autry, the Gund Curatorial Fellow at moCa, featuring works by me and Amanda Strong, Vaimoana Niumeitolu and Kyle Goen, John Edmonds and Tricia Hersey. The show was to honour the discussion that I had with writer and scholar Dionne Brand, and it was a reflection on colonialism, anti-Blackness, Indigenous and Black liberation struggles and “the importance of ephemeral expressions and the arts in creation of freedom.”
I did not realize the significance of the exhibit until I arrived and met La Tanya. She introduced me to Black Cleveland, or just Cleveland as she called it, and the rich history of resistance, revolution and revolt. She laid bare the anti-Blackness of art institutions like moCa in Canada and the United States and told me that she was the first Black curator at moCa, despite Cleveland being a Black majority city and home to a brilliant Black artistic community. La Tanya told me of some of the many sites of resistance she had taken up inside the institution: everything from the conception of Temporary Spaces of Joy and Freedom to insisting that surveillance cameras not be part of the exhibition. When La Tanya arrived at moCa it was already free of charge for the community and free of security guards.
Looking back now, La Tanya took the institution, made it a Black homespace and then invoked Moten’s idea of homelessness in the space. She invited us all in.
That work cannot have been easy. I know because at the opening, the white folks from moCa were visibly nervous, in the best way.
The day of the opening, I thought of Tamir Rice and his family. La Tanya had arranged a luncheon for the exhibition artists with Black artists, community organizers, arts administrators and activists. I sat with two young and amazing Black artists and community organizers from the organization Shooting Without Bullets. We talked about our experiences working with Indigenous youth, for me, and Black youth, for them. Shooting Without Bullets is a Black, youth-led organization that uses artistic activism to elevate youth voices to shift policy, perspective and culture. I thought of the potential of LeRoi Newbold and Nauoda Robinson’s Freedom School in Toronto, Dechinta, and Tasha Spillet-Sumner’s Red Rising Freedom School in Winnipeg for Indigenous youth collaborating and visiting and making art with Shooting Without Bullets.
The night of the opening, I witnessed the gallery full of Black people from Cleveland, Ohio. Overflowing. This was honestly my first time in a large institutional art gallery where the vast majority of people were Black youth, families, artists and organizers. La Tanya had facilitated Black life inside the gallery, outside the gallery and in every space in between.
The piece in the exhibit I’ve thought most of since then was Tricia Hersey’s. Tricia lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia, and she is the creator of The Nap Ministry. The Nap Ministry is “an organization that examines the liberating power of naps and rest as a form of resistance through communal installations of sacred and safe spaces for the community to rest together.” Tricia explained during the artist talk that night that, during slavery, Black people were not allowed to rest or to sleep, and that this lack of rest had continued on into formations of anti-Blackness. Tricia explains:
I was inspired by the idea when I was in divinity school and I was dealing with all of the—Black Lives Matter was actually just heating up at the moment. It was, like, 2013, and a lot of the lynchings were back-to-back online and being shared. And I was a graduate student in a predominately white institution. I was just really exhausted from living as a black woman in America—you know, poverty and crime. I was robbed once when I was in school. And just all of the things around me were coming on me at once, and I just decided to rest. I decided to take naps wherever I could, and it started to combine my research. I was researching black liberation theology, somatics, cultural trauma. I was doing a lot of research around slavery and historic—looking at the historic documents around the commodification of black people in America.
Tricia installs big, beautiful beds and napping areas in galleries and public spaces because, as the insert in the exhibition catalogue states, “Naps help you wake up”—and I’d say, from watching the conversation that night and watching people move through the gallery space, that her napping area, which was a gorgeous, tranquil space with a couch and a bed, had the best impact. Watching people find home and comfort inside this big cement building that was built to house and celebrate white artists was a precious thing to witness. Seeing Black children climb into the bed and relax for a second, touching the art, being impressed in the installation because they were supposed to be there, was a profound disruption of anti-Black institutional space. One of your letters in this project of ours, started at 4:30 a.m., reminded me of the Nap Ministry. You wrote the letter the night you were doing solidarity support work for your comrades in jail, arrested for having thrown paint on racist and colonial statues in downtown Toronto.
My sister Ansley, a singer-songwriter in Toronto, wrote a song called “The Fix” a few years back, which will appear on her new record She Fell From the Sky. It has the line “Wrap their ankles pull them down, Lie by lie and town by town, Heat their bodies molten red, Turn them into arrowheads.” I remember the first time I heard the line, experiencing it as a futuristic vision, one that I never thought I’d like to see. It reminds me of a blog post by NourbeSe Philip:
when i began this blog the idea that police forces should be defunded or abolished was unheard of—
when i began this blog Aunt Jemima still appeared on pancake syrup bottles—
when i began this blog the statue of the former slave owner Edward Colston had not yet been thrown into the Bristol Harbour—
when i began this blog three young Black girls had not yet danced on the plinth on which Colston’s statue stood—
when i began this blog I had no idea what deep and visceral satisfaction I would get from watching statues topple—
when i began this blog no statues of Robert E. Lee had been removed or pulled down—
when i began this blog all the statues of King Leopold were intact in Belgium—
when i began this blog the statue of Christopher Columbus in Baltimore had not yet reached its expiry date—
Ansley’s song was written at a time before the summer of revolt in 2020, the time in which actual statues were torn down. I feel grateful. Black Lives Matter is so generous. It has carried our movement forward, and achieved things we couldn’t achieve during our previous mobilizations. A few months ago, despite decades of Indigenous resistance, sports organizations like the Edmonton Eskimos, the Cleveland Indians and the Washington Redskins had no intention of ever changing their names. Statistics regarding police shootings of Indigenous peoples were not on the radar of white Canadians despite decades of organizing around the Missing and Murdered. Black Lives Matter has included Indigenous peoples in a way that I haven’t witnessed in a very long time. I am so very grateful.
In January 2018, x University in Toronto unveiled a plaque at the site of the Egerton Ryerson statue on campus, a result of the recommendations from X’s community consultations in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. The plaque reads:
This plaque serves as a reminder of Ryerson University’s commitment to moving forward in the spirit of truth and reconciliation. Egerton Ryerson is widely known for his contributions to Ontario’s public educational system. As Chief Superintendent of Education, Ryerson’s recommendations were instrumental in the design and implementation of the Indian Residential School System. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported that children in the schools were subjected to unthinkable abuse and neglect, to medical experimentation, punishment for the practice of cultures or languages and death. The aim of the Residential School System was cultural genocide.
The plaque blurb ends with two quotes, one by Chief Sitting Bull (“Let us put our minds together to see what kind of lives we can create for our children”), the other from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (“For the child taken, for the parent left behind”).
The administration at X University could have taken the statue down—years ago, in fact, and certainly after the release of the TRC’s final report. They could have changed their name and branding. They could still do those things. I was not present or a part of the discussions that led to the plaque. I suspect that the university presented the removal of the statue as impossible because of costs and because we should not erase our history, but contextualize and explain it, as the thinking goes. The plaque is an attempt at con-textualization, I suppose, and yes, Black and Indigenous activist communities in Toronto have taken over this space as a site of resistance.
I was thinking about this statue and the plaque a few months earlier when I visited the Tate Modern in London, UK on my way to give a talk at Cambridge. I was at the Tate to see Kara Walker’s installation, Fons Americanus, in the Turbine Hall. Fons Americanus is a thirteen-metre-tall fountain that is a play on the memorial to Queen Victoria located outside of Buckingham Palace. Walker’s statue is in the style of that memorial and it is a code. Her figures reference the history of empire, transatlantic slavery, and resistance. Her installation takes modernism’s references and remakes the language of public monuments as one that centres Black knowledge, a language that affirms me as a Nishnaabekwe. Fons Americanus is a satirical and exuberant rebuke to British tellings of history and nation, and in that refusal, I felt seen, more than any other place in my visit to England.
In contrast, when I stand beside the statue of Egerton Ryerson in my territory, I feel deflated. I feel the horror and the trauma he caused five generations of Indigenous families. I feel the obtuseness of the institution for adopting him as its namesake in the first place, and I feel its refusal to make it right. I feel ashamed, even though I know I shouldn’t. Ashamed for what happened to my people and for our inability to remove this thing and tell a different story, and tell the truth. (I also feel a little bit of pride and respect for the Indigenous peoples who were in the room when the TRC recommendations and the statue were discussed: I suspect they fought very hard for that plaque and the words on it.) The plaque, then, doesn’t make it better. It doesn’t complicate Ryerson for me—the man, and what he represents, isn’t actually that complicated. Sure, Egerton Ryerson is part of Canadian history, as is the legacy of residential schools. But what would it be like if this statue was taken down and thrown into Lake Ontario, and a statue of a young, queer Indigenous and Black activist was put on the plinth in its place? How would this action, even though it was largely symbolic, change the narrative, complicate our history, make visible a different history that is equally relevant and influential, and also equally related to residential schools and Canadian history? How would this statue make me feel/think?
I get a glimpse of this possibility from the gorgeous actions of Black Lives Matter on July 18, 2020, which covered the statue of Egerton Ryerson with pink paint and the words “Tear down monuments that represent slavery, colonialism and violence.”
Toronto police arrested three of your comrades in connection with the action, and that is why you were up at 4:30 a.m. writing to me as you worked to get your comrades freed from jail. Forced up and denied sleep, because capitalism values statues and property more than it values Black people and Black lives. Up writing, again, instead of at the Nap Ministry.
I’m glad that you are holding on to optimism through all of this. I like that you and your comrades are writing the movement as the movement is happening. The first time I was a part of the idea of writing the movement was during Idle No More. I really appreciate you seeing the seeds that were planted during the mobilization and those that followed. It was lovely to read your words affirming the Wet’suwet’en mobilization as a midwife of this current movement. I regret not doing more to reach out to Black activists and the Black community during Idle No More. I regret not doing the work that would have affirmed Black presence during that mobilization. I am happy to see our communities reaching out to each other more and more as we move out of our organizing silos and into a more reciprocal meeting place.
I miss the energy I felt at the height of Idle No More. I felt the feeling of belonging, that my community was working together, doing different things together towards some broad political goals in spite of differences within the Indigenous community. Indigenous peoples, and therefore our movements and mobilizations, are so entangled with the state through legislation, law, and policy. I have no faith in the state to value Indigenous life or Black life or to make any of the issues we mobilize around better. For me this comes both from decades of study, and my lived experience. I don’t believe in Canada. I don’t believe federal and provincial governments have the skills, knowledge, and resources to build the kind of society I’m interested in living in. I think that at this point in my life, I am most interested in building systems that address conflict, harm, poverty, substance use, health, education, politics, economy, and our relationship to the land and waters.
There is always a cost to large-scale mobilizations in Canada, whether they are Oka or Idle No More or movements for Black life. There is an emotional and physical cost to individuals on the front lines, much like there is an emotional and physical cost to individuals that are forced to live on the front lines of poverty or the overdose crisis, much like there is a physical and emotional cost to anti-Blackness and colonialism. It is difficult to maintain large-scale mobilizations—they aren’t, at the core, sustainable for communities already struggling, and that’s why they are so vital and so important. There is always a backlash in mobilizing against racial capitalism, and the white liberal “allyship” primarily motivated by guilt is fickle and unreliable and disingenuous at the best of times. The state has a myriad of tried and true ways of intervening in our uprising. Some are violent and overt. Others, like elections and false hope, are trickier. They like to study themselves in royal commissions and inquiries as a way of moving us out of the streets and into the boardroom. They like to find Indigenous folks to run for their political parties, promising to do better if they are elected to power. They like to include us by offering us slight shifts in policy or new agreements, by showering us with recognition—like giving us publishing contracts, book awards, music prizes and faculty positions—all the while refusing structural change. They like to divide and conquer and stir conflict until the lateral violence within movements and communities is so virulent that all they have to do is stand back and watch while we tear each other down for sometimes legitimate reasons, and other times for not. They like to make sure we take down our own.
Today is Emancipation Day. And a lot of activists were up through the night working to secure the release of Moka Dawkins. Moka Dawkins is a Black and Indigenous woman, activist, frontline worker, and valued community member. Members of Not Another Black Life were up all night sitting outside of 55 Division, and greeted Dawkins when she was released this morning. I know they must be getting exhausted. I know they must need the Nap Ministry.
Slavery was legally abolished in the British empire on this day in 1833 by the Slavery Abolition Act (after the British had outlawed the slave trade in 1807); unfortunately, white supremacy was not. There is more visibility for Emancipation Day this year in the mainstream media, yet most of the coverage has been from the perspective of Canadians as rescuers, what art history professor Charmaine Nelson calls “good abolitionists,” and the idea that 1833 was the end of Canada as a slave holding nation. We know, of course, that slavery just changed form, and morphed into the anti-Black system we have today. “I’ve never yet had one Canadian student enter [my] class knowing that slavery transpired in Canada,” Nelson told the CBC in 2017, “but they have all been schooled in the fact that, ‘Listen, we as Canadians were good abolitionists. We helped to liberate African-American slaves who fled north.’ That is what they’ve been, you know, inculcated with, that’s been ingrained in them since elementary school.” She goes on to say what scholars Afua Cooper, Delice Mugabo, and many, many others also say repeatedly whenever they are asked: that slavery was pervasive in Canada, and not just among white elites. It was pervasive in all levels of society.
Without this critical Black truth-telling, then, the Canadian education system is teaching that slavery and its legacy do not exist here, that anti-Blackness does not exist here. And yet it is the belief in Black inferiority that perpetuates the abject violence against Black people that you describe in Policing Black Lives, and that underpins the current revolution in the streets. What I find myself thinking, days after writing that last sentence, is that this is also the history, the whitewashed untruthful history, that Indigenous peoples are taught in provincial curriculums on reserves and in urban settings across Canada.
Many of my peoples do not know your history and therefore your present. Part of why this project with you, Robyn, is so important to me is because I believe, like Angela Davis, that our movements need to pay as much attention to popular education as we pay to mobilization. Indigenous peoples know that state education is calculated and designed to reproduce the colonial and anti-Black systems of oppression Canada was founded upon. If we don’t do the popular education piece within our communities, our movements, and between our communities, our movements become vulnerable to the “seductions of assimilation and replicating the logics of colonialism and anti-Blackness.”
Colonialism is invested in us not knowing Black and Indigenous histories. Our truths are not included in state curriculum, and, when we are present, we are a whitewashed, watered-down version of dream catchers and the underground railroad instead of four centuries of brilliant and radical Black and Indigenous resistance.
As an Indigenous educator, I have responsibility to bring the history of transatlantic slavery and the current legacy and reality of anti-Blackness into everything I do.
At the end of Policing Black Lives, you write that “In Canada, any struggle for economic, racial and social justice must necessarily address ongoing settler colonialism. In a white settler colony like Canada, it’s not possible to talk about abolition—not only of prisons but also of the enduring legacy of slavery in all state institutions—without simultaneously supporting Indigenous decolonization movements.” In Canada, any struggle against colonialism must necessarily address the ongoing Canadian practice and ethic of anti-Blackness. In an anti-Black colony like Canada, it’s not possible to talk about decolonization or to organize and mobilize around decolonization without simultaneously supporting abolition and the total annihilation of the enduring legacy of slavery in all state institutions.
To only focus on the Indigenous in North America is to be thinking through things and theorizing with incomplete knowledge. We cannot afford to build incomplete worlds on incomplete knowledge; if we do, we risk replicating the very oppressions we are trying to liberate ourselves from.
A few months ago, you texted me a photo of the Freedom School Toronto with a solidarity banner for the Wet’suwet’en. A few months later, my kids, who are teenagers, invited me to a Black Lives Matter protest. It was the first protest during the pandemic. At the meeting spot, organizers greeted and welcomed us, handed out masks, and reminded us about physical distancing. My family has been to lots and lots of protests, but this one felt different to me. There were DJs and music. There was dancing and joy. There was a level of organizing that made everything smooth, and I’m sure this was in part motivated by the increased policing of Black protest in southern Ontario and beyond. On the way to the protest, ten minutes before it started, the local rock radio station read an announcement that the local police were in support of the protest. This never happened during Idle No More or the countless Indigenous protests that I’ve participated in here. This protest was against the police and policing, and they attempted to appropriate it.
Seeing the chief of police take a knee at the protest reminded me of every single part of reconciliation.
Now it is mid-August, and attention is turning towards back to school and back to teaching. While the universities are online, public schools, driven by economic concerns, are heading back. Black people and people of colour comprise 83 percent of the COVID-19 cases in Toronto. We know that Black children and families will take on more risk than white families in the return to school. Still, in spite of this global pandemic, Black movements have organized through it and have changed the city, the province, and the country by moving us a giant step closer to the worlds we imagine. And, I know it isn’t over. I’m grateful. I’m grateful for the care and attentiveness you’ve paid towards my community. Organizings for Black life are regularly affirming Indigenous peoples. We both know these moments don’t come along often, maybe only once in a lifetime, and so we know to push through exhaustion. We know that our work will never be done. That these are seeds our children will have to nurture and grow and then take to the streets once again.
The pandemic confirms this.
In a few short weeks the minomiin, or wild rice, will be ready for harvesting in my territory. Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe families will sneak our canoes across leaf-blown, white-cottaged lawns and launch into contested waters. Some of our rice beds will have been destroyed by cottagers who desire pristine beaches. Our Elders will point to sites of monster cottages and tell stories of camping on those very spots when they were kids. There will be sadness and loss in our canoes and also hope because we are still here, harvesting our good seed. Minomiin will get gently knocked into the bottoms of our boats, on tarps and bedsheets, and much more will get knocked into the lake, fall to the sediments and get planted for next year. Still other grains will end up in the stomachs of geese and ducks, who will use minomiin’s energy and spirit to propel them south on their migration. The harvest will look different this year. We won’t be able to do it together, but rather in small family units. This is fine for the harvesting part, but it will make the processing of the grain more difficult. The roasting and parching, breaking the shell off and winnowing will be more labour-intensive. There will be more fear and less safety when we are out on the water in smaller groups, inevitably confronted by angry white cottagers who wish we were dead, so they could enjoy our land in peace. This year there will be no angry town hall meetings where the racism of white people is on full display without consequence. Ricing, and the rice wars, will look different this year.
The wind on the lake sometimes works with us in the harvest, and sometimes the coldness, the strength, make it harder to collect rice. The wind has its own work to do, but it reminds me of breath and breathing. It reminds me that at some point, someone else breathed for us.
Again, I return to “Ga(s)p.” NourbeSe sings:
We all begin life in water
We all begin life because someone once breathed for us
Until we breathe for ourselves
Someone breathes for us
Everyone has had someone—a woman—breathe for them
Until that first ga(s)p
For air
And, later in the piece:
Each of us has had someone, a woman, breathe for us. To keep us alive. Each of us has allowed someone, a woman, to breathe for us, our coming-to-life dependent on an Other breathing for us—a form of circular breathing this:
Circle breathing
Circling breaths
Breathing for the other
Could we, perhaps, describe this process as an example and expression of radical hospitality?
Radical hospitality. Radical sharing. Radical generosity. Homelessness. Homespace. Doing. Making. Being. Expanding. Building up. Wayward expansion. Black Land. Indigenous Land. Circle breathing. Queering. Mino-bimaadiziwin.