Medicine for the Resistance

About Medicine for the Resistance

An Afromystic and Anishinaabekwe talk about everything medicinefortheresistance.substack.com (https://medicinefortheresistance.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

patty krawec

Category

education · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

5 Sept 2018

Latest episode

6 Mar 2023

Latest episodes

128 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   6 Mar 2023

   Global Indigeneity

   This great conversation on Indigeneity is from a couple of years ago and it just keeps being relevant. Being Indigenous is an analytic, not an identity. We need to talk about that. Patty (00:00:01 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=1.86)): You're listening to medicine for the resistance Patty (00:00:04 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=4.53)): Troy was so smart last time, and this could only be better with Joy here. Joy: God we're in trouble. Hey, it will be a smart show. Kerry: (00:00:20 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=20.54)): Couldn't be more perfect. Joy! Oh yeah. Patty (00:00:24 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=24.71)): Just so much happening, right? Like this has been bonkers in Native Twitter. Joy: Oh, I know. I don't either. Patty: Because we had the list right? Where everybody was kind of losing their mind about the list and then some anti-Blackness that was happening as a result of the list. And then, you know, and then kind of, I saw what was trending was seven days of fighting in Palestine and I'm like, no, that's, let's talk about seven consecutive days. Kerry: It's been like, what, how many, how many hundreds, you know, almost a hundred years we're coming up to now?- like stop it! Patty: And then we're talking about global indigeneity, right? That being Indigenous is more than just living here in North America, which is something that, you know, I've kind of been unpacking for myself over the last year.  Then there are conversations happening, you know, who is Indigenous, in Palestine and the Levant area. Patty (00:01:37 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=97.49)): Um, and then what claims does that give them to land? You know, and what, you know, what claims does that give them? Um, and do we rest our claims on land solely to being Indigenous? I mean, even here, it's all migrations, right? The Anishinaabe started and then we moved east and then we came back and there are tribes that exist now that didn't exist then.  You know- like the Metis, right? They didn't exist at the time of contact and yet there are distinct Indigenous people and what's there. So all of these conversations are so complicated. And then into the midst of these complicated, you know, difficult conversations, of course, rides Daniel Heath Justice's voice of reason and recognition into these conversations. So I can't think of two people that I would rather have this conversation with, for Kerry and me to have this conversation with, than with Troy and Joy. Troy: (00:02:51 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=171.17)): Exciting to be back and, uh, and to meet, to meet Joy online, at least. Joy (00:03:00 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=180.46)): Yeah, it's my pleasure. I remember watching you, um, I guess a couple of months ago when you're on and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is like, just totally blown my mind. And I said it to Patty and she's like, yes, let's do a show. I'm like, yes, let's do it. Let's figure this out because yeah, it's a lot! Kerry (00:03:21 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=201.42)): I agree. There's so much complexity. We're talking about Palestine and we're talking about these roots; where do we put roots down? What is Indigeneity? What are all of these spaces? I was thinking about Burma or AKA Myanmar. And that brave stance that young woman-I'm not sure if you guys heard about it- at the Miss Universe pageant, held up a sign saying, ‘Pray For Us.’ We are being persecuted or we're being killed, I think the message said.  Once again, it made me think about how precarious, you know, our spaces are, how the colonial system has this rinse and repeat way of creating, um, the same kinds of spaces. These genocides that are created all the waves through, um, the way of being. I was thinking about China and the Uyghur tribes, the Muslim Islamic based tribes that are being,  ‘rehabilitated’ we have no idea to the scope and scale. Kerry (00:04:38 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=278.01)): I have been fascinated recently with North Korea.  Just the very existence and structure of how North Korea even exists in this realm.  All of these pieces led me back to this idea that the reality, maybe I'm posing a question for all of us. Where do we begin? When we think about breaking this question down, you know, um, the right to be forced off of our lands, this space of, of the massacre, that seems to be such an integral part of the bloodletting. That's such an important, integral part of why we take over the land. And then finally, how the resources, because I noticed that we touch certain places, you know, we protest about certain places, more so than others. because resources are advantageous to more so than for some of the colonial structures that exist? And it makes it advantageous for us to take a moment's movement in those spaces versus others. I just, I've been very sad this week. I had to step away because of all of it.  As you mentioned, there's been so much! I'm just going to breathe now….. (laughter) Troy  (00:06:06 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=366.85)): I don't even know where one can start. We have you have to start, I guess, where we are. As you pointed out, what's going on in Palestine has been going on, you know, it’s 73 years since the Nakba stuff started and it's been going on since then,  although the roots go back even further than that. So, you know we can't that didn't just start this week and we didn't just start relating to colonialism this week, the four of us. And, uh, we didn't just start relating to genocide and racism either this week. So I think we're all situated in ways that give us insights into these topics, but also blind each of them in different ways too. So it's good to know. When I was a kid, my dad got a job in Beirut in Lebanon, and we were there before the civil war and our house was just, just up the hill from the Palestinian Palestinian refugee camps. Troy(00:06:54 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=414.33)):  So it was a lot of the kids I played with before that were there before I started school. And then I did first grade in Beirut. Some of the kids I played with were from the refugee camp. Then later when we came to this country and just the blatantly anti-Palestinian bias of the media was a real shock because you know, these are people who were kicked out of their homes because somebody else wanted it. And, uh, and of course, Lebanon wasn't doing a great job of taking care of them either. It was, you know, that was a big shame was that all these refugees are treated, treated so poorly in the, in the countries that took that they, that they went to. Troy (00:07:30 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=450.01)): But you know, those little kids are my age- they're in their fifties now, and they've got kids and maybe grandkids and there are their generations that have been born in exile. And, uh, meanwhile, now we have this thing going on in Israel itself, where Arab Israelis are being targeted by Jewish Israelis and some vice versa too. It's just street fighting between us. We're not even talking about Palestinians, we're talking about different groups of Israeli citizens based on their ethnicity and their religion. Yeah, it's interesting. Joy (00:08:06 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=486.25)): Cause I  live on social media and so just watching the discussions going on on Twitter. And it's interesting to see a lot of the activists for Palestine, which is great, but they kind of like, I've seen some memes where it's like, oh, just give you know, Canada, this part of Israel, this part of Canada or the US I'm just like, I'm like, okay, friends, no, we're not going to be doing this. Right. Because we're talking about colonization, but I'm surprised by how little, a lot of the activists understand that they're currently living in occupied states. Like, I'm just like, wow, like really like Canada, US you know, I'm, I've been quiet about for most of the weeks. I'm just like, okay, you know what? I'm just going to let people have their space, but I'm like, come on. Joy (00:08:54 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=534.73)): Like, you know, like, and I'm watching like Black and Indigenous Twitter, we're just kind of saying, yup, that's the playbook. There's the playbook check, check, check, check. And we're like, we know this, we've been through this, we've done this, you know, for, you know, 500 years on this continent. Right. And so, and in many places much longer. And so I'm like, okay, let's, you know, I'm finally, I said something I'm like, okay, you know what? We need to kind of understand that this is a global issue. And that, you know, we are still currently occupants working in occupied states as it is, and sort of state of Canada, the state of us, right. Mexico, you know, and as you see, like, you know, with the countries that are supporting Israel, you know, a lot of them have like a huge long, giant history of, you know, occupation and colonialism and genocide behind them. Joy (00:09:42 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=582.81)): And it's just like this isn't a surprise folks. And so, I mean, but it's good because I've had a lot of great conversations with people who did not know this. And so I'm kinda like, okay, let's educate, I'm kind of prickly about it, but I'm gonna, you know, do this in good faith. And so, and I mean, it's just been, you know, like Patty said a week because, you know, I'm coming off a week of serious anti-Black racism within Indigenous communities as is too. So it's like, okay, that's, what's up now. Right. It's a new type of, you know, I don't know, uh, fall out of hatred, fall out of genocide, fall out of colonialism. It's just like, okay. And yeah, which way is it going to, you know, smack us in the head this week? It just kind of feels like that. I'm just like waiting for what's going to happen next week is going to be something else. So it's been a yeah. Interesting two weeks, I guess. Patty (00:10:38 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=638.45)): Well: I think some of it is that we don't have a solid understanding of what Indigenous means say, particularly in Canada because of the way we use the word. Um, you know, uh, yeah, we, we just, we don't have a really solid understanding of it. So that's where I'm gonna kind of punt over to Troy. So, you know, if you could kind of give us that global, you know, that because not everybody also thinks of themselves as Indigenous, right? Like not all countries have that same kind of history where they would have a settler Indigenous kind of binary . I hate binaries, but, you know, because they're, they're never, they're never that clear and distinct, but if maybe you could kind of help us out so that we're at least working from the same understanding, at least in this conversation. Troy (00:11:24 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=684.38)): I mean, but the thing is I hate to jump in and say, this is what Indigenous means, because, because Indigenous is a contested term and it's, it's, it's used differently in different places, geographically, but also in different contexts. And, uh, um, you know, I guess, I guess what I got some, some attention for on Twitter a few months back was basically for, for putting up other people's ideas, who I, that I teach in the classroom about, you know, Indigeneity isn't is not an identity, it's analytic. And it has to do with our relationship to land our relationship to settler-colonial states. And that our identities are, you know, in my case, I mean, in other cases, other Indigenous nations and cultures, uh that's. And so we have, you know, Indigenous, there are 5,000 Indigenous languages in the world. Um, if each of those is a different cultural group, then we're dealing with a lot of diversity. 90% of human diversity is Indigenous. Troy (00:12:18 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=738.31)): So it's hard to say any one thing about all Indigenous people are this or do this because it was less, we've got most of the world's cultures and, and, and get then as, as, as, as Daniel Heath justice was, was reminding us on Twitter, uh, you pointed it out Patty to me today. And it was, it was worth looking at again, is that it's not just a political definition either because our relationship to the land is because it's everything. It's not just, it's not just political, at least for, for many of us, it's not. And, uh, for many of our cultures, we derive our very personhood, our peoplehood, our, or you know, our spiritual identity is all connected to, to, to land and water. So, yeah, I mean, what, what, what Indigenous is Canada from a double outsider in the US I'm not Indigenous to the US but I've lived here for a long time. Troy (00:13:03 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=783.07)): And I, I kind of, I kind of am like another settler in the US in the sense that I've been here for much of my life, whereas Canada is, is, is a place I observed from the outside. But it seems like in both the United States and in Canada, Indigenous is often used primarily domestically to refer to groups that are Indigenous within the borders of the Canadian settler state or the US settler state. Because, there are so many different groups and, and what other, you know, what terms is, what have, we can say native American or Aboriginal or first nation. So rather than just listing all the, all the many hundreds of nations, people might use that term, but then, you know, there's, there are Indigenous peoples in all over the Pacific and in much of Asia and in much of Africa and even, even a few places in Europe. Troy (00:13:47 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=827.44)): And it has to do with this colonial relationship where we about the Sam. We have a really deep connection to Sápmi, our land and water. That is which we, you know, our, in our, our way of viewing it, it's animated. We ask permission from the water.  When we take water or do we ask permission from a place of a piece of land before we build a house there. The settler states, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia came in, came in in recent time, historically, you know, within the last 500 years came in and extended their borders through our land and claimed it as theirs. And then there was all the boarding schools and all that stuff.  Those are similar histories, uh, because there's sort of a similar playbook that comes from, that comes from a certain way of looking at the world. Troy(00:14:37 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=877.33)): That land is something that isn't a dead object that we can just buy and sell and parcel up and own. Coupled with the idea that with the will to take that land from other people. People who are first nations of Canada, the US and Australia, New Zealand have experienced that. Indigenous Northern Japan, I've experienced that it's, I wouldn't say that the, I knew and all the many different, uh, Aboriginal nations in Australia and the Maori of New Zealand and all the Canadian first nations, and then the new it to the Métis and all the native Americans and Alaska natives and, and, uh, Kanaka Maoli in the US are all the same. We're not, we're so radically different from each other in so many ways, but we share this, we share this, the important art, a similar way of relating to our land and water. Kerry (00:15:23 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=923.5)): That brings up for me a question when, you know, first of all, Troy, you're always so brilliant. And when you put it out there in the way that you just did, I'm like, wow, it's a vast, vast space! And then when you put the number on it at 90%, I went that's everybody pretty much, you know? Um, but what also comes to mind then is, is the word indigeneity serving us or Indigenous serving us and, and this, um, and the movements that all of us as a whole, as, as you know, a group like, just does it, it's served to be using this word in particular and then leaving it to be open to interpretation or not? Patty: Traces of History, by Patrick Wolfe, because he looks at the way race is constructed differently in different places, right?  It is like when we talked with your friend Marina about how Blackness is constructed in Brazil. and how it works in North  America and how it works in different places because it all works. Patty:(00:16:37 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=997)): It works differently but for the same purpose. So, you know, and I think indigeneity, it works differently in different places, but for the same purpose, it works, you know, colonialism works to sever us from the land to sever us from each other, you know, to sever our relationships. I'm just writing, you know, it was just writing a bit about, you know, the Cree understandings of kinship networks and how many mothers, you had one that's tied up in the language, right? Like your, your mother's sisters are also your mothers and then your father's brothers are also your fathers. And then their spouses are also your mothers and fathers. Cause if they're married to your father, then that, you know, like these kinds of intricate webs of relationships and those things all get severed, you know, and our connection to land because, you know, the colonial powers are very mobile. Patty (00:17:26 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=1046.26)): They're moving around all over the place. So they're moving us around all over the place. And then it's like, I'm reading this book right now that Kerry had recommended, um, Lose Your Mother, um, about, you know, she had heard that the author's trip home to Ghana and, and, and how heartbreaking it was because you go looking a for home and realizing that that's not home. And I just finished Hood Feminism by Mikki  Kendall. And she's talking about real, you know, having to come to terms with her seeds may have been, you know, left Africa, but her roots are here this is home. So then that's easier than thinking about being Indigenous and diaspora not having that same connection to land, but having that kind of fraught relationship with colonialism, I don't know. And I'm thinking too about the ways that we do find even, you know, tomorrow night, we're going to be talking about refusing patriarchy, because everything exists in opposition to colonialism, right? Patty (00:18:26 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=1106.23)): Like indigeneity to a certain degree. We weren't Indigenous before the colonists got here. I was Ojibway. Joy's ancestors were Lakota, Troy's were Sàmi. Like, you know, like we were ourselves, we didn't have this collective identity that placed us in opposition to another collective identity. We were ourselves. And if you were our enemies, chances were we called you a little snake. That seems to be what we call everybody. So whatever identity, it's like, you know, identities, you know, existing in counterpoint to a binary that just doesn't work. It doesn't work for anybody. And so people have to keep, but that doesn't fit. I just keep thinking about how we keep identifying ourselves in opposition to something. I don't know that that serves us, but I don't know what the alternative is because we do need some things, some kind of coherent way of thinking about ourselves in opposition. And I think that's okay to exist in opposition to something that should be imposed. It's so intense. Kerry (00:19:29 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=1169.69)):lt really does. Patty. I know for me, in particular, it's so interesting how some of the ways that you and I, outside of this space, how some of these very similar thoughts, um, I, I've almost been having the same kind of process going on in my own mind about how do I relate to my being this as a woman of diaspora you know, a Black woman that has been just kind of left here or plumped there, the point here, I guess, I don't know. Um, and how that interrelates to my, being this, to being whole, and also relating it back to the colonial space that I have had to adjust to in my thinking, um, I've been doing a lot of study recently on a man named Kevin Samuel's. And he's been, uh, approaching this topic from what we would have considered a 'Menenist' standpoint, but there were some arguable facts in the way that he was breaking some things down that has caused me to have to question how I stand in my feminist. Kerry (00:20:52 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=1252.03)): Because I kind of consider myself a bit of a feminist in my feminist stance and how this itself has become a way that we have created diversion and division between ourselves as men and women, the idea of the masculine and the feminine, and then how that exists in the non-binary or binary space. Like, so what I'm, what I'm getting at is all of these different isms, all of these, these structures that have been created really feed into our way of being separated and with the separation, it allows the system to keep feeding itself. I almost feel like we have to start examining the liminal spaces that exist, trying to find the commonalities, but at least allow for our specialness, that individual part of who we are to stand. Because as you mentioned, Patty being Ojibwe versus being Cree I feel there's such beauty there, right? And like, I know that I believe that when we, when we just classify it under one thing, it, it helps, but it doesn't do that make sense? And I'm really just caught in that right now. Like I know that I've been trying to process that and do we need some radical acceptance that goes along with that understanding we are different and special. And that specialness is what makes us unique and rich and full in the space of our togetherness. Troy(00:22:39 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=1359.21)): This is, I love this conversation because just like last time as I'm sitting here listening to this, I can do so many ideas. This phenomenon that we have, whether it be as Indigenous people or as members of any of our Indigenous nations or as racialized other, or as women, or as LGBTQ or as whatever group or groups one belongs to, and then being treated as a member of that group. If I define myself as Indigenous, then I'm defining myself in opposition to colonization and I'm erasing all kinds of other important things. Defining oneself in opposition to patriarchy is opposing something, but we have to post these things. I think like you said, petty, and we can't, there's also a sense, a certain degree to which we can't, you can't help it. I mean, I was thinking of Franz Fanon and his essay on the fact of Blackness and when he was growing up in the Caribbean, he really didn't think of himself as Black. Troy(00:23:28 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=1408.8)): That was sort of an abstract, weird thing. He thought of himself as educated from the privileged classes and, and to a certain degree as French. And then he goes to Paris to study and he's walking down the street and this little, little girl was holding her mom's hand and points and says, look, a Black man. And, um, that's when he, you know, realizes that he can't escape. He is Black and he can't escape it because people won't let him escape. That's, that's not that he's always identified or interpreted as that. And if we're interpolated as, as women or as or as Indigenous, or as whatever, whatever groups we may, we may be identified as we can't just pretend that we're not. I mean, we can't. And so I think, like you said, petty, sometimes it's worth fighting. Um, I can tell, I go back to the story. Troy (00:24:18 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=1458.5)): I always liked to fall back on stories, but in my own existence, you know, my mom's white American, and she went over to Norway and married my dad and us, I was there for a time. And then there's been in the US for time and in the US you know, I grew up speaking both English and Norwegian. I speak English pretty much without an accent. I look white and I get a lot of white privilege in the US as long as I don't mind people not knowing anything about, my Indigenous culture. I have a much different situation than my Sàmi relatives and began to feel like maybe I shouldn't be calling myself a hundred percent Sàmi. And then I go back and experience vicious anti-Sammi racism directed at me. And there's nothing that secures you and your own. Troy (00:24:57 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=1497.8)): There's nothing that secured me and my Sàmi identity as much as being harassed for being Sàmi than being threatened physically. That just makes you I guess I am, because it's not fun. And I would rather not be in this position right now, you know? Um, and, and, uh, I think that's one of the reasons for these alliances, but they also are alliances Indigenous. These, these are, we're a bunch of different groups that have a common cause and can learn from each other and help each other have awesome glasses. I kind of noticed that Joy(00:25:41 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=1541.05)): I was kinda thinking about like, you know, I'm like, this is the resistance like we're resistant. So cause I always liken it back to like, you know, some sort of weird um, you know, thing, but solidary, it's interesting, since we weave through this topic, I'm thinking about like, you know, indigeneity and land. And I saw a point, but, um, Carrington Christmas a few days ago. And so, and she mentioned that you know like not all Indigenous people are tied to land because many of us are in cities and urban centers. So what does that look like? And so when I saw, um, Daniel's, uh, tweet, you know, his chain, I was kinda like, I need to trouble that for a little bit because a bunch of us are removed from land and relations too, but at the same time, it's like, what does that relationship look like within cities? Joy (00:26:28 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=1588.33)): Um, so I just wanted to say that before I forgot that, what does solidarity look like? Oh my gosh. Um, I can't even think of one way it looks like, because again, like when we have like Indigenous, we talked about Indigenous as the overall say within North America and I that for sake of brevity, right? Like you have like, you know, Black Indigenous people, you have, like, I know a guy who's Cambodian and he's Indigenous. Right. And so it was like, what does that look like? How do we manage that? And these folks that I'm referring to are like, you know, Indigenous to North America. Right. And so it's like, so when I see discussions about like, um, what does, you know, kinship look like? What do relations look like? What does it mean to have a relationship to the land? It's like, what does that mean for a Black Indigenous person who didn't necessarily have that kind of a relationship for various reasons, whether it be slavery, whether it be, um, racism, right? Joy (00:27:25 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=1645.38)): Whether it is being chased off the land, you know, as say, some of my relatives were right. And so this is the thing. So it's like, how do we address solidarity when we don't even when we tend to think of Indigenous as like, you know, first nations, um, 18 in you, it's right. And just like one shape or form, you know, kind of brown veering towards the white sort of thing. Right. And so in Canada, at least. And so, and when we're far more likely to accept someone like Michelle Latimer, no questions asked, but then when I kind of stroll up and say, Hey, I'm Indigenous. Or like, Nah, you're not right. And so you're from Toronto and your hair is curly. It's not now, but that sort of thing. Right. And so solidarity, I mean, I can tell you, what does it look like based on the past couple of weeks, and I'm sure we'll get into that, but you know, it doesn't look like a list. Joy (00:28:19 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=1699.95)): It doesn't look like, you know, a supporting list who, you know, are largely Black Indigenous people or even run by people who are largely anti-Black. Right. And so, um, but yeah, it is a wide and varied topic from being a political analytic to like, you know, having a relationship to land, to having relationships with our relations. Right. And so I couldn't even begin to start thinking about what that looks like, but I do resonate with Kerry's point with just kind of like, you know, having those separate identities, but, you know, still coming together for that resistance to, and so, because we need to kind of have, you know, those differences because someone who was Anishinabek has a different relationship to Atlanta, someone who has Lakota. Right. So it's, you know, and me as someone who is Lakota and living in Toronto, it's kind of like, okay. And I kind of meander through these spaces. I'm like, should I be having this relationship with the land? Like, my people are like way out in the Plains, but here I am, you know, it's kind of like patching through what it is because we've been shifted around by colonialism taken away. Sorry. That's Patty (00:29:28 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=1768.94)): The reality of it really is Troy living in the Pacific Northwest, which is about as far as he can get from Sàmi land.  You know, I finished all, I've talked about this now that you have massive territory, I'm still within, there's not a big territory. It's not big, it's not Ojibwe. Right. My people are Northwestern, Ontario. It's a 24-hour drive to get up there. Right. I can be in Florida by the time I get there and not among Black flies, you know, but, but in terms of relocation, right? Like in the US relocation was government policy that went beyond boarding schools, they were shutting down, you know, in the allotment period, they shut down reservations. They were moving people into cities, you know, kind of getting them off the reserve and moving them into, you know, from, you know, from the Midwest into the city. Patty (00:30:26 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=1826.98)): So you're certainly not alone in terms of being a Plains, Indian living, living, living in a city. And I think that's, you know, where the writing of people like Tommy Orange is so valuable, you know, that kind of fiction where he's writing about urban Indians. That's 80% of us. That's 80% of us who are living in cities far from our home territories. You know, I see, you know, people who are saying, you know, you know, they're Ojibwe and they're Lakota and they're may, you know, like they've got this. And so then who are we? Because we didn't grow up in these kinship networks to tell us who we are. We grew up disconnected. We know, because like you said, Troy, from the time I was little, I grew up in my white family. But from the time I was little, I was the native kid. Patty (00:31:15 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=1875.19)): I was the Indian, even though I was surrounded by white people, you know, grew up in a blizzard, like, Tammy Street said, you know, growing up in a blizzard, the blizzard of whiteness, um, you know, um, you know, kids didn't want to play with me because of my skin colour, which, you know, as bonkers to me as a little, you're not playing with my skin colour. Oh, I dunno. This is a story outside of, um, you know, so other people impose that on me. So I couldn't run away from it. If I wanted to, when I got to high school, I let people think I was Italian. Cause that was easy here. And we talk about passing privilege. Um, but passing contains an element of deceit and deception because when you're passing, you're not telling people who you are, you're deliberately withholding that information. You're allowing them to think that there's some, that you're something that you're not. And you know that, and that's corrosive. And yet you, you know, this idea of being Indigenous is freaking complicated and it doesn't need to be colonialism just ruins everything. Patty (00:32:19 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=1939.63)): So what would the refusal look like? Because that's also what I'm thinking about because tomorrow night when we're talking about patriarchy, I started off talking about resisting patriarchy. And then I changed my mind to refusing because to me that sounds riff. We talk, we've talked, we've talked about the politics of refusal, which is just, you know, I'm not going to engage with that anymore. I'm just going to build this thing over here. I'm just going to refuse to deal with that because that does not speak to me, does not help me. That does not contain my life. What would it look like to exist as Cree, Lakota, Black, Sàmi, Ojibwe and refuse colonialism? What would that look Patty, Kerry, Joy, Troy (00:33:07 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=1987.43)): [Laughing ] existing in opposition to it? Kerry (00:33:14 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=1994.72)): This is the new train that my brain is going down. Well, you know what? I love it. I think you're onto something. Um, as we, you, you, you brought back that reminder of the politics of just simply deciding not to engage. And for me, this conversation is bringing up so many different things. For example, Troy, when you mentioned going home and hitting such resistance when you go back, you know, you can't deny being  Sàmi. It makes me think about when I go home to visit my mother's family in Antigua, it is Black, you know, the way that my cousins and my aunties and all of my people back there exist that every teacher they've ever had is Black. Every storekeeper is Black, all their doctor's lawyer, everybody is Black and dark skin Black. Kerrr (00:34:18 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=2058.14)): You know, there has been very little mix on that small island. The sense of being in your note is so radically different. I have realized in my time then what it is for me, I, I know my Blackness, I'm a Black woman and I have a lived experience that makes me guard in that space. Right. Whereas when I am there, it just is, and you live and you exist in that space. And it gets me thinking about this idea of just not engaging. What would it be if I could potentially create a space like that here? So for me, this boils down to being able to connect and create an economic basis. So where I can shop in stores that are, you know, Black West Indian, you know, just my culture experienced in those well Browns. And we also know that that economic power makes a difference. Kerry (00:35:25 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=2125.7)): I think I read a statistic recently that in North America, um, Black people, the money stays in our community for about six hours before it is extended out into other communities. So the dollar does not cycle, even though we are one of the powerhouses for an economic base, our dollar is so strong. And not only that we normally create culture, you know, uh, Black women, you know, we, we, we kind of build some of that creativity, but that panache, comes from North America. Um, it comes off the backs of us. And so partly when I think about how we, how maybe we can disengage in some ways, it is about that. It's about creating our own little nuggets, you know, creating our own little niche spaces that allow us, afford us to tap into our own uniquenesses as who we are, and then share, but really starting to create those spaces Kerry (00:36:30 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=2190.15)): So, um, for example, as I said, I think in particular, we still have to exist in the system. So to me, it is coming into the self-awareness of that uniqueness, creating, the economic basis for that, for me, I think that's fundamental, especially in my community, we just don't hold on to that dollar. Um, creating some of that economic base by our shops, create shops that are, are, are, or economic foundations, like grocery stores in our communities. We know we have food deserts and most of the communities that we exist in by our own grocery stores have outlets, especially that focus on our, um, image. We don't control our Black image, nobody like that is controlled by others. If we could get our own. I think it's happening more with social media, with people being able to hold their YouTube channels and creating our own sources of who we are, how we want to be seen. But for me, that's where it begins two things, money, and also, um, controlling our image. I think those two will be powerful, Troy (00:37:46 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=2266.34)): Powerful. And I think, um, I really, like we said, even when we're in the midst of our refusal we can't you know, it's one thing to refuse colonialism. It's another to pretend it doesn't exist. Um, because I'm, you know, I'm either going to increasingly sort of psychotic and just detached from reality or, or I'm going to have to, you know, do take specific measures, like invest in investing in communities, um, take control over our images, those sorts of things, which are, which are still, there's still acts of resistance with our acts that are focused, not so much on negating the oppressor as on empowering ourselves. And I think, I think, uh, yeah, I mean, it's harder for, for, and I'm not doing it all alone. There's so much, like a mentor for so many Indigenous people who are living away from our, from our native land. Troy(00:38:36 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=2316.37)): Uh, I can't, I can't live, I saw my life surrounded only by Sàmi people here and no would, I want to, I'm so enriched by living by so many around so many other people, but I can certainly make an effort to, to include and celebrate and, develop and engage in Sàmi culture in my life. And so, and tell me so many ways of being and knowing. Um, and it's so much easier now that we can talk to people every day back home too. But, uh, but, but the part of it is also taking that same way of relating to two people and to place and relating to the people around me and the place that I am at. Not in a possessive way, because this isn't my, this isn't my land. I'm on, I'm on now, y'all planned here. This is, this is their land, but I can relate to the land in terms of respect and in terms of a living relationship with a living entity. Troy (00:39:24 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=2364.04)): So it would be different if I'm back home. This is like, this is where, this is where my ancestor’s bones are for the last, you know, for the last 20,000 years. And, uh, that's not here, but, but it's still, it's still, you know, a different way of relating to that. And then I think this is back where the Indigenous people are so important because knowing and working with and interacting with Indigenous people here keeps me Sàmi, even though they're not me. I was only interacting with settlers and with other, with other non-Indigenous people too. But if I never interacted with other Indigenous people, you could disassociate it. Then it comes all down to you as an individual, as opposed to being part of communities. And so there are different types of communities. They, you know, could be a relationship with people as a kind of community even if you're not part of, part of the group of that group. Patty(00:40:15 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=2415.6)): Want to hear more about that? How relationships with other Indigenous people keep you Sámi Troy (00:40:22 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=2422.8)): Because, uh, I, and this works much easier for me than it would for my half-brother because my half-brother, his mother is from South Asia and he would never be, he would never be seen as white, um, a white person who speaks English, American, English fluently. If all I hung out with were, were white English-speaking Americans, I would be, I could be still very much participating in this sort of inner negotiation of part of who I am and this sort of alienation of by saying, yeah, I'm just one of you. And knowing that there's something that I'm suppressing, something that I'm cutting off and that sort of inner injury, but I would also just be having that culture reinforced all the time, because those become the cultural norms, those, those become the exceptions. And if I'm also hanging out with a non-people of colour who are, who are not Indigenous, but, uh, but then especially Indigenous people who, who have analogous relationships to their place, uh, they're not the same people don't relate to, to, to this land in the same way as, as we, um, uh, markdown may relate to our mountain valleys and our coasts. Troy (00:41:30 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=2490.75)): Um, but there's some, there are some analogies, there's some, there's some, some patterns that I recognize and there's also more humour than I recognize. And I recognize what it's like to be in a group that is at home and is viewed as outsiders by the majority of the population that lives there. It's like we're sitting right here where we belong and you look at us like we're outsiders. And I see that in, in my native friends here, uh, and my native colleagues and, uh, and that's like, yeah, I, I know what that's like. I get that. That's, um, that's a shared reality, even if it's from two different places. And so, and then having other types of relationships to place other types of relationships to people and community is reinforced by the people around me, other, other ones than the sort of relationship of domination and ownership and, and alienability that I can just sell this land and buy other land and that sort of thing that makes those things less automatic. It's a way of making sure that I don't just sort of slip into, this colonizer mindset or colonized mindset. Patty(00:42:33 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=2553.91)): It goes back to some of the things that have popped up in the chat about feeling kind of disconnected because you know, their relations are so scattered. Um, yeah, I'm going to have to sit with that. That's really helpful. Thank you. Joy(00:42:53 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=2573.46)): It feels similar because, again, how many Lakota is in Toronto? Right. And so, and just being, and I mean, if we're going to pan indigenize, you know, the sense of humour, certainly, you know, something we share, you know, across the world, it's like, yeah. Colonialism, ah, right. And so we were able to laugh at our misery so well. Um, but yeah, I really, I relate to that and feel that, and it's, it's about re I mean, it's kind of veering into another topic, which is about relations and such. Right. And so, and again, going back to what Kerrington said, saying like, you know, um, my Indigenous community is also an urban community and its many communities. Right. And so I'm paraphrasing really horribly, but I can't remember the tweet, but nevertheless, right. Like, and she's like, who's someone to call that invalid because she is Mi'kmaq. And I believe she lives, she doesn't live in Ontario somewhere. I can't quite pinpoint where, but, um, yeah. So it's like relations and what keeps us, you know, um, Indigenous or Lakota or Sàmi, even when we're far from Kerry(00:43:53 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=2633.92)): I was thinking Kerry, about what you had said about controlling our image. Cause I was having conversations recently about, um, both social media and about our presence on social media. Um, because of course, we don't own these things. I mean, we're here. Like we can all share that Trump got bounced off every social media platform in existence, but another one of my native friends just got another 30-day suspension on these books. So we can all laugh about it happening to Trump, but we know that it's more likely to happen to us. You know, the, you know, the algorithms are not set up, you know, for those who live in, you know, in opposition to colonialism the things we say, like what happened with, you know, um, the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls posts on Instagram. I don't think, I, I don't think there was any benefit to Instagram to deliberately silence those posts. Patty(00:44:48 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=2688.51)): But what I think is more likely is that there was, it hits some kind of algorithm. It didn't stop to consider the context of these posts because it's just an algorithm. And so then, because there was some commonality, it bounced all of them and that's what happens, right? Like you set up a rule and that's all these things are right. You set up a rule that affects you, you know, that's everyone equally, but it's not everyone equally. It never is who sets the rules determines. Uh, you know, and so, and when we do these things like on social media and, uh, you know, we're also in a sense performing, performing indigeneity for, for clicks and likes and views. And you know, we're performing a hype of ourselves. That's palatable to the people that are going to pay money for it. So it's a two-edged thing like, like Joy, I live on Twitter, I am very much out there. Patty (00:45:43 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=2743.8)): You know what I think about it because, you know, I've got a book coming out next year. And so I want to make sure that I have a big reach. And so then you think about that, well, how now am I not performing things that are authentic, or am I, you know, so what I'm, you know, you're kind of constantly balancing all of that stuff because it's right. It's a space that we assert ourselves in. And I think we should be there. I'm not arguing against it obviously. Um, but we also need to be careful about it. And particularly right now in COVID most of my conversations with Gary, when I'm talking about Indigenous things, I'm lately quoting social media people. If people that I know on Twitter, I am not quoting the women in my drum group because we never see each other. So my local community is becoming more and more remote and my soul. And then there's, we lose the accountability of our communities because I mean, we can Twitter mobs, we can take each other down all the time, but that's not real accountability. Patty (00:46:44 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=2804.01)): We can rail against the writer of the list all day long, but that's not real accountability. Real accountability happens in the relationships that we form in the Kerry: I think you said a lot, you settled it. I like you're in my head, like what you were saying, because I too have been very much thinking about that, thinking about my image, thinking about how I am showing up on social media. I'm not a Twitter connoisseur like most of the three of you are. And I was really thinking about why, why I think  I shy a little bit away from Twitter is because I think it's so polarizing. You've got, you know, those 140 characters to speak your mind and make that point. And it's a remedy that has to, well, you hope it's riveting and captures the imagination and then it moves on. Kerry(00:47:56 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=2876.41)): And so for me, that flow getting out there means you've really got to be in that larger-than-life space and, and keeping ourselves balanced there. And that's the thing about what I believe social media has done. It is this beautiful space that allows us to be out there to get our points across. But I just got a shadowban, funnily enough, on Insta. Yes, I'm a cool kid, but the cool kid got put in jail for a minute, simply because I was doing a post that was about Black women and trying to empower them. And I, I'm still not sure what in the algorithm, didn't like what I was saying. And I know I touched controversial stuff, so there's an intimacy and sex coach. I talk about some things, but, for whatever reason, I was really careful about this particular post as I put it up and it got shadowbanned for me, what that taught me or what, I remember being sobered by was the fact that we have this platform to be able to speak our truth and our minds and, and create all of this wonderful stuff. Kerry (00:49:12 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=2952.13)): But it really can be controlled by the very fraction that we are choosing to resist. And so that in itself means we have to conform to it. And I remember wanting to stop my feet. I'm the youngest child, and I so wanted to go into temper tenure mode over this one. Um, but, but it, it was sobering in that as well. That as much as, um, we talk about wanting to resist, so I'm going to bring it back to that, that idea of resistance and being in it. I still have to conform to some degree, to show up, to be able to use this platform, to move my voice forward. And, and I find that just a real cognitive dissidence for myself, you know, I wish we owned a Twitter platform. Do you know what I mean? Because that's where true freedom lies. I almost feel like, you know, we're, we're just getting a little lone of this space and when, when whatever, and whoever is ready, it all just comes crashing down. Patty:  And then let's not talk about women, the AI, oh, go back to the list. Right. Who's going to gatekeep who gets to be a member. Joy (00:50:27 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=3027.02)): It's interesting. Right. Because you touched on two things, you touched on the rules. Right. and rules applying to everyone equally. Right. And so, and when we think about what indigeneity is, you know, the rules don't apply to everyone equally because it's like, okay, well I need to see your pedigree. And it's like, well, that doesn't happen for Black Indigenous people. Like I don't have, you know, like slavery. Right. And so, and you know, birth certificates, like so many of my family, were not allowed to have birth certificates, you know, until fairly recently, like in the last hundred years, so that's not happening. And of course, and you mentioned it before a patio, I think last week that even just proximity to Black people at a certain point meant that you were Black, whether you were or not. Right. And so a lot of Indigenous people were labelled Black. Joy(00:51:17 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=3077.84)): Right. Because I don't know if they looked at a Black person at one point or another. And so this is a thing, right. And so then we have a gatekeeping list. You have the gatekeeping Twitter, which, you know, I still am very much in love with, but nevertheless it is, you know, it is a loan space and I mean, and again, and you have people who are, you know, okay, well, I'm going to make a list off of these rules that don't affect everyone equally because we're, I'm angry about the Gwen Beneways, or I'm angry about the Michelle Lattimer's or whatever, but it's like, but then, you know, I'm also kind of racist on the side too. So, you know, and it's like, the rules don't apply. They can't possibly, like, if you're trying to find a Black person's, um, what's the word I'm looking for a family tree on ancestry, Joy(00:52:04 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=3124.91)) It's not going to happen. Like I looked, I tried for my own family. Right. And so, and a lot of it is still oral and, you know, it's interesting cause Daniel had a thread about, uh, lower this, uh, today. And so I'm like, but again, what does the law mean to different communities, right? Like for white communities, like, yes, you had an Indigenous ancestor, like, you know, 400 years ago that, you know, is that lore not right. As opposed to like, you know, a Black family, you know, and I'm speaking largely to my experience with this, um, Black American. Right. And so, you know, is it lower because that's all we had, like, was it guarded more closely? Was it, you know, held more, um, carefully, right? Because again, then you had the community connection that also how's your community, uh, accountable. That is the word I'm looking for because it was a very tight-knit community. Joy(00:52:58 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=3178.31)): And so someone would say, oh no, that wasn't your grandparent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. And so it's really interesting to kind of look at the rules and the gatekeeping and just how they change based on, you know, your skin colour. Like it is just, and you know, these rules that were created by white people that say, you know, you are one drop Black, you are, you know, you're not Indigenous, right. Because we want to get rid of you and we want to create more of you. Right. So yeah, my mind is being bent again, but I don't know where it just took us. I'm sorry. Patty(00:53:32 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=3212.31)): You were also talking about relationships and the way certain relationships were constructed to serve the needs of, you know, the way certainly, you know, communities were split apart or concentrated in certain places and pushed aside where either, because you have family law would be different in a history where families were disconnected over and over and over again, who's holding that collective knowledge. When you, you know, when like in losing your mother where you know, her great grandmother gets, goes off with the family and then winds up getting sold for gambling debts and never even had a chance to say goodbye to a spouse or children, child that might, that may have been back, you know, on the plantation, does, oh, gambling debts, your, I guess, I guess we're selling you, like, how do you hold collective memory? Kerry: I love that because also what comes up in that is the collective memory becomes so rooted in the space of the trauma. Kerry (00:54:29 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=3269.19)): Yeah. And, um, I found after reading that book after reading Lose Your Mother, that I had this wistfulness about making the space of it, right. Because we all, most of us Black folks, um, hold out this dream of, you know, putting our feet, planting our feet, especially in Ghanian soil and, and going to the slave castles. And knowing that this might've been the last space of our ancestry. And in this book, when she counts her version of what happened in that space, you know, there were some, some holes for her, you know, some real charts came up about how, while this was the story of her coming, this was a place of where she came from. Her family's story of slavery being a slave was an erasure, of who she was. And it got me thinking Patty, and Joy and Troy, it got me thinking about my own family history. Kerry (00:55:33 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=3333.57)): And so recently I've been talking to my mother because all of my aunties and uncles, you know, of my family, especially my Antiguan family, they get a little bit older. And, um, I recognize how they have been the gatekeepers of this history. And they ensured that our legacy as a family was, was whole and real, you know, they got us together. They would tell us these stories. And as they're getting older, I'm seeing that my generation, especially with COVID, are a little more disconnected, like my cousins. And I, even though most of us were raised together. Um, you know, I'm noticing this, we're not getting together in the same way. And so one of the things that I'm playing with and realizing I'm feeling called to is, is to take some reclamation that I think one of the ways that we can offer resistance is in the reclamation of that history. Kerry(00:56:39 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=3399.46)): Um, I really want to do some, um, you know, recordings of the stories that my, my mom tells and my dad, sorry. I'm like, well, yeah, my dad too, I would love to do my Bajan side, but my dad tells get the stories of my aunties and uncles and what I thought was so interesting when I mentioned it to my mom, she said to me, you know what, Kerry that would be amazing because I don't know very much about my father, her father, my grandfather's history. They are, um, they came from Haiti and I think it was my grandfather's mother that immigrated from Haiti over to Antigua. So all this time, I thought we were originally Antiguan in that space and come to find out that it's not necessarily that I got that Haitian blood in me too. And so what would it be? Kerry(00:57:35 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=3455.26)): And I think there's, there's some real power in us being able to do that, too, to take it back as much as we can, even if it is just from that oral history, that oral history is powerful, you know, um, in losing your mother's today, uh, um, mentioned that you know, we all want that root story. I remember reading Alex Haley's roots when I was nine years old, it was one of the biggest books I ever read up until that, right. 1,030 pages, I think it is. And I remember reading that story and it was just like, for me, I was like, how did he know all of that? And that's one of the spaces that sparked my curiosity of wanting to know. And so I think there's a responsibility if we can to know that truth and to try and gather it. And that in itself is a powerful way for us to offer resistance in this space as well. Yes, Troy (00:58:39 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=3519.93)): Exactly. A thousand times. It's a, it's, um, it's a way its resistance, but it's not resistance as focused at the colonizer or the oppressor. You have to claim stories. what could be more empowering than that than reclaiming your stories. This is our modernity. Um, some years ago, I got into an argument with a senior faculty member at, uh, at, uh, at the University of Oslo. And I was just a junior faculty member at a tiny college in the Midwest of the US and he was talking about Indigenous people having, you know, so many Indigenous people haven't experienced modernity. This is our modernity is being alienated, being fragmented from.  Who, who has experienced that more than the African diaspora of being, being alienated, being, being cut off from, um, that's our modernity. And, uh, to fight that by reclaiming and by and by and by owning our own cultures. Troy (00:59:31 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=3571.79)): And it's a, it's a really important thing for me to do that because there are, it is a living language and there are people who are native speakers and when I can have conversations with them without having to go to in a region, that's going to be, you know, a really important moment for me right now. It's more than I can read what people write because I can take my time and parse it out and stuff. Yeah. But, um, but I also think that we need to, you know, our cultures are all changing too, and we need to own the things I'm, I'm working with. I've got a colleague, uh, his name is Caskey Russell he's clean cut.  And he and I are both big, big, uh, soccer football as we call it everywhere else in the world, fans working on a book on Indigenous soccer. Troy(01:00:12 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=3612.89)): And this was like, um, because, uh, it's not that the way that we do different things, you know, we, we talk, we have people teaching Indigenous literature, Indigenous novels, Indigenous films, um, uh, we, certain Indigenous cultures did have writing before colonization. We saw that I wasn't among them. We didn't have writing, uh, before, before colonization. And so it was the colonizers who taught us literacy, but we have our own literature. We have our own, our own stories and our own sensibilities. And I think we can do that within cities. We can be who we are and be doing new things to it, as long as we have those connections. And I think those stories are still out there. You've got to record those stories. You've got to keep them, and it will be not just for you because that's going to be a resource for so many people. Kerry (01:00:57 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=3657.13)): Speaking on that point. One of the things that I realized is how few stories come out of the West Indies. You know, I started kind of digging around a little bit and I think there's only one book that I know of that talks about, uh, an Antiguan family that, uh, trace back their history of one of their relatives and the, he could, and I think he had been a slave, like one of the last slaves or just out of it. And that's one book. Like I can't find very much, um, in that space. So to me, I recognize there's an opportunity, uh, for it. And, maybe there is a book or two here. We'll see, Patty: I'm talking about your book or would just be me. Okay. This has been really good. This has been really, really good. I am always so grateful for you guys when you spend time with them. Troy (01:01:52 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=3712.99)): Thank you so much for inviting me back and Joy it is a pleasure to meet you like this. Joy (01:01:58 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=3718.9)): It's nice to meet you too off of Twitter. And so I'm sure you just watched me ran like most people. So Kerry(01:02:05 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=3725.65)): Whenever I do dip, Joy you, give me joy!. I love it. Patty: One of the things I learned recently is that caribou and are the same animal, which I had no idea. I don't even remember how I learned that. Um, but it just kind of blew my mind that caribou and reindeer are the same, which makes Troy and I kind of cousins because I'm caribou clan. So that was on Twitter now, you know, see, I did not know that and right there in front of them, um, but then I saw that caribou and reindeer are the same animals. And that was the first thing I thought I was an animal that does really well Patty (01:02:55 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=3775.41)): Up north and who come from up there learning to live with them. Patty (01:03:00 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=3780.72)): Well, it makes sense. Right? You tip the globe in different parts of the world, look related, you know, you can see it. There's no reason why the globe has to be this way. It's really neat. And when we went up to Iqaluit, um, the one fellow that asked me, he asked me if I was Ojibwe. And I said, yeah. And he says, yeah, we look alike because we are men used to kidnap your women all the time. Joy (01:03:23 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=3803.49)): There's that Indian humour, Patty (01:03:28 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=3808.83)): That was just so weird and random. But anyway, thank you guys so much. This has given me so much giving me so much to think about these episodes are always like masterclasses Kerry: 'till we meet again. Cause I'm sure we will. Somehow Speaker 1 (01:03:52 (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/Y4yXtauqA10QIYHwfy8xohs0i1GFhI3LXH8N03FDUZAINPUYvBKNILGhfultcB7H_SvDu11a0xqs-sRA54vqPExjwao?loadFrom=SharedLink&ts=3832.94)): You can find Medicine for the Resistance on Facebook and the website, www.med4r (http://www.med4r). com. Don't forget to rate, share and support us by buying us a coffee at www.kofi.com/medicinefortheresistance. You can also support the podcast and so much more by going to patreon.com/payyourrent. You can follow Patty on Twitter @gindaanis and at daanis.ca. You can follow Kerry on Twitter at @kerryoscity or follow her on FB  online@kerrysutra.com. Our theme is FEARLESS. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit medicinefortheresistance.substack.com (https://medicinefortheresistance.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   4 May 2022

   All places are fish places

   Patty I come across the coolest people on Twitter. And one of those cool people is Zoe Todd, who is the fish philosopher, and I love that. And another thing that I love I was going through, we have a questionnaire because you know, of course we do. And one of the things that Zoe mentions in the questionnaire because I asked, you know, what kind of books do you know she would? Or would you like to recommend because I am obsessed with books. And and you mentioned, Aimeé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (https://files.libcom.org/files/zz_aime_cesaire_robin_d.g._kelley_discourse_on_colbook4me.org_.pdf), among other things. And I love that essay, so very much. It's I, a friend of mine recommended it to me, I'd never been exposed to it before. I don't know why. And I live tweeted my reading of it because it was just like, it's just like phrase after phrase of just this gorgeous language, completely dismembering, you know, white settler ideas of colonialism. And it's just, it's just an it's just an it's just an extraordinary essay. Kerry Interesting, it's been brought, I haven't read it yet, but it is on my I just … Patty It’s a quick read,  what maybe an hour because it's but it's just absolutely brilliant. I feel like and then Fanon, you mentioned him to and everybody I read mentions Fanon and I think it's inevitable I'm gonna have to .. Is he really dense and hard to read? Because that's … Zoe It depends which things you read, I think, so I've gone back and started rereading, Wretched of the Earth (https://vt.instructure.com/courses/23718/files/886914) just to sort of, because it's really focuses on, you know, how to decolonize. And but I think, yeah, that's where I'm going back to, but I mean, obviously, so much of his work has shaped a lot of the current scholarship, especially in the US and around critical race theory and thinking through anti Black racism. And so, yeah, I felt like, I needed to go back and, and re-engage with him, especially now that I have more grasp on sort of, like, the issues that he's talking about. And, you know, I tried reading him in my PhD, and I brought him into my thesis. But yeah, that was like seven years ago. So I have, you know, different questions now, and different things that I want to be responsible to. So yeah, yeah. Patty So what are those things? Because you, you’ve been through a lot like you've been pretty open about it on Twitter, about, you know, kind of your, your hopes when you went into graduate school, and then your experiences in the academy. So how, what are you bringing to, you know to Cesaire and Fanon,  which really isn't going to be the focus? I'm just curious. Yeah, you know, because we reread things, and they're different when we come back to them because we're different. Zoe Yeah. So I came to both of their, you know, like scholarship, at the end of my PhD, when I went to defend my thesis, and it was, it was a very difficult experience, because the work I was doing wasn't really in line with the kind of anthropology that was being done in that space in the UK at the time. But I did have a sympathetic internal examiner. And she said, you wrote a thesis of, like, you wrote an ethnography of colonialism. And so what if we just reorganize this and you open with all the decolonial theory? And I was like, okay, and that gave me the okay to then go and bring in these decolonial scholars, and just sort of unapologetically center that, because otherwise, you know, they were trying to take me down the path of, at the time in the early 2010s. Like, it was really, you know, multispecies ethnography, and like, these, like environmental anthropology, sort of discourses were happening that were, like, potentially useful, but they weren't attending to like racism within the academy. They weren't attending to Indigenous people as theorists in our own right. And so like my work was not fitting into what they thought anthropology was. And so that was how I came around. And really, it's the work of Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (https://criticalposthumanism.net/author/zakiyyah-iman-jackson/) and her work on post humanism, and sort of rejecting how that's been framed by white scholars. That was what brought me in. So I really have to credit her writing. And she's also how I came to start reading Sylvia Winter, like, all, you know, I didn't find very much useful in my training in the UK, but it was the work I started to encounter after, when I started to say like, well, how can I actually be accountable, and then it started reading like Black feminist scholars, and then then everything started to open up. And I also that was when I started engaging with Indigenous legal scholars in Canada as well. And then that was what shifted me. So, anthropology was a hard experience to do a PhD in, but I'm still, you know, it shaped me like, it's, it has undoubtedly, like, set me on the path I'm on. So I'm not like a, I think I'm at peace with how hard it was. But I'm also so grateful that I got, it's almost like I got to do a postdoc afterwards, just reading all the people that I should have been reading in my PhD, but that they weren't teaching. Because I remember at one point in my PhD saying, like, Well, why aren't we reading Fanon? Someone? I'm laughing out of the discomfort of it, someone was like, “Oh, that stuff's really dated.” And, you know, until that just shows you where white scholars worse, you're go, like, 2013. But I'll tell you, so many of them are now saying like, they're decolonizing anthropology. So. So you know, it all comes, you know, back into sort of, you know, relationship. But yeah, so I'm very grateful like that, …  friends. And I'm not pretending that I that I have read all of their work or, but I'm trying really hard to be accountable to their work, and then how their work is, like so many people now really brilliant people are in conversation with their work. So I want to be accountable to those spaces Patty you had talked about, and this is this is making me think of something you had talked about before Sara Ahmed, who talks about citation or relationship. And we have talked with, and I'm spacing on her name right now, but a Māori academic [note: we are referring to Hana Burgess]. Remember, the one about doing a PhD without quoting any white men (https://medicinefortheresistance.substack.com/p/doing-a-phd-with-no-white-men-with-f58?s=w)? ZoeThat’s awesome! PattyI found her on Twitter, like she had thrown out this tweet about how she was going to do a PhD, without quoting any white men, and we're like, what? We need to talk to you!  And then she kind of introduced me to Sara Ahmed and Sarah's work on citational relationship, which in my own book, I think a lot about because I'm mentioning like, you know, this book and that book and how these authors, and thinking carefully about who I'm citing, you know, because two people say the same similar things. But do I really want to cite the white guy who said it? Or do I want to cite the Indigenous women who say it but a little bit differently? In a different context? Kerry So then that can tie in bias when we are doing that? Have you? How, how, how have you been grappling with that, you know what I mean? Even even that piece of it, because of what we are told in society we should be putting down and who should be valued as the ones to be cited? Zoe Well, in my own work, I'm, like Sara Ahmed, she wouldn't know this, but she kind of saved my life because she was another one of those people whose work I encountered kind of near the end of that process. And and when I realized, like, I don't have to cite all these miserable old white men, like she was modeling it, you know, and, and that was a real, like, it was the fall of 2014 was a real turning point for me, because I kind of wrote this blog post (https://umaincertaantropologia.org/2014/10/26/an-indigenous-feminists-take-on-the-ontological-turn-ontology-is-just-another-word-for-colonialism-urbane-adventurer-amiskwaci/) that went viral about this kind of turn in, in anthropology. And and then it started to get attention. And you know, and some people were really unhappy with it and telling me like, I didn't understand the literature and blah, blah, blah, but somehow I connected with Sarah Ahmed on Twitter in that period. And, and she, you know, like, I don't know her personally, but she kind of gave me the confidence to sort of go back and cite Indigenous people, you know, and like, so I quit trying to impress all these like old white anthropologists and, and that has, like, continued to grow. And I remember at my thesis defense, like, this is, you know, this is 2016 they leaned in close and they were like, Why would you come all the way over here to like a world class environmental anthropology program, and almost none of the people here show up in your thesis. And I received that like this, like, you know, like, it was like a blow and I remember I like gathered just gathered myself. And you know, everything that led up. Some of it was just so hard and I remember I just like gathered myself and like steadied myself against the table. And I, I kind of leaned in and I spoke very softly. So they had to lean in. And I said, because the experience of working here was so hard. And I came here in good faith, you know, as an Indigenous woman, to work with people who work on, you know, similar topics and with our communities. And it wasn't a good experience. And I didn't see people working with, like, with kindness and reciprocity. And so I resolved that the only way I could honor the stories that my friends and interlocutors shared with me when I was working in their community, in the western Arctic, was to tell those stories in connection with Indigenous thinkers and with Black feminist thinkers. And, and, and I went on and on and on, and they finally were like, okay, okay, okay, we get it. *laughter* But they really, like I really had to say it, you know, like that, you know, I wasn't there to just reproduce that program. And like, I, you know, and I don't want to harp on, you know, programs are programs, they reproduce themselves. And you know, and like, it's not like people were malicious, per se, it was just, they were like, fulfilling a role that they thought they had to fulfill, which was like to discipline me and mold me in a certain way. And I wasn't molding in the way they wanted. And I was, you know, trouble. PattyYou were a killjoy Zoe I was a killjoy and a troublemaker. Kerry So I just I love this because, one, there's such bravery in that. So like, you just, you just did that, you know. I just love it. That is that, that is when you are deadly, you know what I mean? So when you can show up and just say, leaning in, so that they lean into you, and mention that this experience caused me to have to call in all of the rebels to support but I stand with what I know is true. And to me, that's revolution in its highest form. Patty Zoe takes it all on. You did a great read on braiding sweetgrass, to us it was it was it was, it was really, really good. I mean, I love braiding, sweetgrass, Robin’s an apostle, It is a lovely book, you brought up some really good points. Did you take any heat for that? Zoe No. And I mean, I tried really hard with that one to be really careful. You know, it's one thing for me to kind of say, like, you know, screw Latour, we don't need to cite him. It's a whole other thing to engage with an Indigenous women's writing. And so I wanted to make sure that I was very thoughtful. And I mean, I love Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work like, I've taught it now for five years straight, like every term. And I was actually like, I was really shocked when I had those realizations. Like, I was literally out walking in the forest when I was like, wait a minute, she doesn't cite a lot of other Indigenous scholars, and you know, what's going on structurally, that would, that would cause that. And so I wrote it out as a thread. Almost as much to like, help me think out loud about, like, what is going on there. And it you know, and so, but people have been really generous in their responses. And so but, you know, it's taught me that, like, well, even the most incredible work still can't do everything. So, so asking and, I think, to have been working more and more in these sort of Western conservation spaces and seeing how, you know, Indigenous work sometimes gets taken up by white biologists, scientists, you know, people who are doing this kind of environmental work, and you realize, like, oh, they really love it, when there's a single sort of person, they can credit, they really love that narrative of like the single hero. And yet, so much of our work is just completely rooted in thinking together all the time in different ways. And like, putting pieces together that may not translate and you know, they can't say I learned this from 70 different people, you know, they're not going to do that. And that's, that's given me some new things to think about about how to my team and I do our work. We're doing fish fish work and how do I make sure I don't recreate those sort of like erasures in my own citation practice so but it's, you know, I'm not here to say you know, this person did did a bad thing. It just, Oh, wow. Here's, I'm sure she wouldn't have even thought when she wrote the book that it would get taken up the way that it has where it's just this like runaway, you know, sort of hit that everyone you know, everyone, everyone's reading it in Canada and US at least. Patty Well, seven years after it was written it hit the has hit the New York Times bestseller. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, it's, it's the gateway into a new way of thinking., Kerry It was my gateway. I definitely know, when we started the podcast, sorry, sorry, when we started the podcast, you brought that book to my attention Patty, Braiding Sweetgrass, and it was my gateway in to understanding. So absolutely, I can see that happening. Patty It's just when you know when these things are gateways and then people stop there. Zoe Yes. Patty And that's I think where you were talking about because when I think about citation or relationships in my book, you know, in, you know, what I what I'm writing, I'm, I'm thinking about my own limited knowledge. And the fact that I'm quoting all of these other people, that I'm referencing all of these other people, is a recognition that I don't know this stuff all on my own. I mean, that's why we do citations, right? Because we don't know. And so what I want people to do is what I do, you know, when something particularly grabs me and I, they've cited it, then I go and I pick up that book. Zoe Yeah. Patty And so that way, my book becomes a gateway to other books. Zoe Yes. Patty And then I just joined substack (http://pattykrawec.substack.com), because of course I did. Because one thing that I really enjoy is putting books in conversation with each other. And I did that with We Do This Til We Free Us and Border & Rule, I read them alternating chapters, and then wrote an essay  (https://rampantmag.com/2021/04/a-broadened-sense-of-abolition/) on it and had them in conversation with each other. You know, so that citational relationship and thinking about who we're quoting, it's, that's what we're doing, we're putting these things in conversation with each other, seeing what happens, and then and then developing something new. And then this is kind of my segue into your essay on fish. Fish, Kin, and Hope (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/692559) because, although, you know, citing traditional Indigenous knowledge is getting a little bit more, you know, recognized. You start with that. That's what that's what, that's what that essay starts with, with Leroy, and I'm just gonna read it because I I just I love it. I love it so much. And it I had to stop and have a good think. So you're citing Leroy Little Bear. And he says: We as humans live in a very narrow spectrum of ideal conditions. Those ideal conditions have to be there for us to exist. That’s why it’s very important to talk about ecology, the relationship. If those ideal conditions are not there, you and I are not going to last for very long. Just text Neanderthal. Ask the dinosaurs. What happened to them? We asked one of our elders, ‘Why did those dinosaurs disappear?’ He thought about it for a while and he said, ‘Maybe they didn’t do their ceremonies.’ – Leroy Little Bear And I loved that. Because it made me think about dinosaurs, they’re ancestors really, related if we're all related, they’re ancestors of a kind. And now we're putting them in our cars. And that's not very respectful. And you kind of get into that in the essay. So can you talk about a little bit because that was super intriguing. Zoe You're having a very similar reaction that I did when I you know, when a friend had seen him, give that talk live, and she wrote me and said, Zoe, as soon as that's online, you have to see it, you're going to love it because he brings up fish in that talk. And he said, I remember there's like because I almost haven't memorized I've watched that talk so many times now. It's like my, it's my origin story as a thinker like Leroy Little Bear has shaped me so deeply. And I've never met him. And he's like, evolved with scholars I can ever meet. I really hope I get to meet Leroy Little Bear because he's just, he's so brilliant. And, and so yeah, and in that talk, he talks about like, you know, nobody's talking about the fish a lot at this conference yet. And I was like, yes, yes, we have to talk about the fish. But from that part of the talk, where he's talking about the dinosaurs like that, that, that sort of just that part of the talk really turned my thinking on its head, especially because I'm from Alberta. I'm from Edmonton. I have settler and Indigenous family in you know, from and in Alberta. My mom is a white settler. And my dad is Métis. And I grew up immersed in the oil economy of Alberta. And it's it's inescapable. It's just everywhere. It's everything the Oilers, you know, just going to university in the early 2000s. And in the engineering building, you know, all these rooms are sponsored by like, oil and gas companies and oilfield services companies and so that that sort of like what he shared about the dinosaurs and ceremonies completely shifted, it refracted my worldview, completely. And I started to think about, wait a minute, like in Alberta, we live in this place that is full of dinosaur bones, because just just the way the geology has has worked and and we burn fossil fuels, like our whole economy turns on this, and what does that mean for our responsibilities? And so yeah, that that kind of led to some, you know, now I'm thinking through that in another piece that I've submitted that hopefully will get past peer review. I sort of asked some my deeper questions about like, what does that mean for us? Like, What responsibilities does this invoke for us? And I brought I bring in the work of Métis scholar Elmer Ghostkeeper. And then also a story that Tłı̨chǫ writer Richard VanCamp, shares about, that an elder shared with him with permission, a story about a trapper who became a cannibal, I won't use the name. And, and that, that there's sort of elders have speculated that maybe the oil sands in Alberta, if they continue to dig, they might uncover what was buried there. And that something was buried there to protect people. And so all these things, I sort of bring them together in this this other paper that I hope will get published. Yeah, but you sort of had the same train of thought that I did, or was like, of course, their ancestors, like, they lived before us. And, and I had never thought of them as like, political agents, or like, you know, having their own worlds where, where they would have, of course, they would have had ceremonies, you know, like it just, yeah, that was a really transformative moment for me as an urban raised Métis person living drenched in a wheel, Alberta, and I've never thought about, you know, the interior lives of the beings that had come, you know, millions of years before. Patty Yeah, I’m just thinking, Kerry’s like I have a grandson, he's got dinosaurs everywhere. Kerry It really is an interesting thought when you said now we put them in my car in our cars. I was like, wait, wait. Yeah, we do like, yet again, to me, what brings that brings up is the interconnectivity, the interconnection that exists between all of us, and how, you know, our, our ancestry, our relatives are from all different shapes, forms, and how and what I find is interesting, even thinking Zoe that you come from this Anthro, this anthropological kind of background, even thinking about those ancestors of ours, who might have been two footed, who didn't make it through, you know, and just this, this realm of how when our worldview stays polarized on this moment, but yet, we don't take into account all the gifts and connections that have come from that path. It's a really interesting space, like my brain is going. And I never thought about thanking the relative dinosaurs, because you guys are the things that fuel our cars. And also then to juxtapose against that, I think about how, once again, the system has used that against us as well. Do you know what I mean? Like, we know, there's so many things happening, because we put gas in our cars. Zoe Yeah, Kerry so much dissension in the world, and how we've all been displaced in the world, because of this gas, we want to put in our well, we didn't necessarily want to put it in. But that's just how things kind of rolls you know. Zoe Yeah. And I wonder about like, do they, if they can feel through the vast sort of like stretches of time? Like, do they feel sorrow for how we're treating them? Or do they feel sorrow for us that we don't understand them as ancestors, or don't think about them as ancestors in that sense. And so in this paper that I recently submitted, I also sort of argue that, like, science claims, Dinosaurs, dinosaurs as a kind of ancestor, in that like, sort of the common ancestor of humankind, or like, you know, that we stretch back to these ancient beings. But I argue that they they claim a kind of ancestry without kinship. And so and that's a very like white supremacist way of framing relationships is that, yes, I can claim this dinosaur or this being but I don't have any obligations to them. And I get that, you know, I bring in Darryl Leroux and Adam Gaudry, and other who talked others who talk about white people claiming and did Indigenous ancestry contemporarily without kinship, where they sort of say like, well, yes, I have an ancestor from the 1600s. Ergo, you know, thereby I am, you know, you have to honor me. And as I, I try to tease that out. And that's where I sort of, I look to Elmer Ghosttkeeper, who talks about a shift in his own community in northern Alberta, between the 60s and 70s, where when he was growing up, you know, as a Métis person in that community, I think he's from Paddle Prairie. And they, you know, he describes how they grew up working with the land, making a living with the land. But then when he came back in the 70s, and oil and gas, like, specifically gas exploration was happening, he found himself working in heavy machine operating work, he found himself work making a living off the land, and that just that shift from with and off, shifted, how he was relating to this land that give him life and his family life. And as he just so he did his master's at the University of Alberta anthropology and his thesis is really beautiful. And then he turned it into a book. And I have to credit colleagues at the University of Alberta, including my friend, David Perot, who turned me towards Elmer’s work and also just like, really beautiful, and I love getting to think with Indigenous scholars and thinkers from Alberta, because it's not really a place. You know, I think when a lot of like people in other parts of the country think of Alberta, there's reasons they think about it as like, a really messed up place. And like that, that is a fair assessment of the politics and the racism, I'm not excusing that. But there's also so much richness there, like Alberta is a really powerful place. And, you know, and it is where all these dinosaurs are and, and this incredibly dynamic, like land and water and, and so, I'm just really grateful that that's where I get to think from and I don't like that's Catherine McKittrick, you know, asks people, where do you think from? And where do you know, from? And so, my answer to that question is, you know, I know from Edmonton, which it's been called, Stabminton, Deadminton you know, it has a lot of, you know, negative connotations that have been ascribed to it, but it's home to me, it's on the North Saskatchewan River. It's, I love it. I don't live there right now, but I love it. Patty Identity is a poor substitute for relations. That's, you know, that's what you're talking about when you're saying, you know, they recognize science recognizes them as kind of ancestors, you know, creatures that predated us and from whom were descended. But only or, well, they're descended in a kind of way. Zoe Yeah, Patty as but as progress, right as part of that linear progress. So there's no relation. There's a there's an identification without relationship. And then I was thinking of kind of a my own experience. Because I had identity without relationship, growing up. I was the brown kid in the white family. My mom moved me south I had no contact with my dad's, you know, with my Ojibwe family. And for me, that was very impoverishing, this identity without relationship, because other people identified me as native. You know, they looked at me and they saw a native person. But I grew up in Southern Ontario in the early 70s. Nobody, I didn't know there were reserves within a two hour drive. I had no idea. I thought all the Indians lived out west somewhere. No idea. And so to me, that felt like impoverishment. And so when people make those choices, and they're choosing these relationships, the you know, this, these identifications without relationship. It's like, why would you choose impoverishment, but they don't, they don't feel it like impoverishment, because the relationship is one of exploitation. What can I What can I extract from them by way of knowledge, by way of oil, by way of plastics, by way of, you know, learning off the land instead of with the land, which kind of brings me to anthropology, because it really confused me about you was that you study fish, but you're an anthropologist. And so that's obviously a whole field of anthropology, because I always thought anthropology was like Margaret Mead studying, you know, people living in shacks, and you know, kind of imagining what the world would have been like for, you know, these Stone Age people who somehow magically exist in the present day. So they’re 21st century people, not Stone Age people. But just like, that's kind of I think, and I think that's where most people go when they think of anthropology. So if you can please correct us. Zoe Well,white anthropology is still very racist. White anthropology is still like, it's trying. I said, Patty I How is anthropology fish? Zoe So the long story worry is that I started in biology. And you know, it's a 2001. And it was not a space in 2001, that was quite ready for Indigenous knowledge yet. And I struggled. So like I was really good at science in my in, in high school. And so everyone was saying you are a brilliant young woman, we need more women in biology and in the sciences, you're going to be a doctor, like they were pushing me that direction. So I was like, I guess I have to do a science degree. And I went in really excited because I I'm really fascinated by how the world works. But the way they, they were teaching biology, I'm gonna give them some credit, I think things have shifted and 21 years or 20 years, but the way they were teaching biology at that time, you know, half the class was aiming to get into med school, you know, and the other half was maybe, like really excited about like a specific topic that they were going to spend, you know, their time working on. And, but you know, it's just that experience of like, 600 person classes, multiple choice exams, like, that's just not how I work. And I now like, in my late 30s, understand that, like, Oh, I'm ADHD, and there's a very strong indication that I'm also autistic. And so like, those learning modalities were just not working for me, and definitely not working for me as Indigenous person. So I was sort of gently. I had taken an anthro elective in the first year that I got, like a nine. And it was on a nine point system at the University of Alberta at that time. And I like to joke that my first my second year GPA was a four, but it was on the nine point system. *laughter* Patty Looking for nines is that you're trying again, Zoe it was, I was not I mean, it was a little higher than four, but I wasn't doing great. So a mentor who was working in his lab, Alan Thompson, he said, he just sat me down one day, and he said, you know, you're really passionate about people, is there a way you could do a minor that will allow you to finish this degree, but allows you to explore those sort of social aspects. And so we looked at my transcript, and I done really well in Anthro. And so I said, Well, what about doing an anthro minor. And so I did. And that was actually a real turning point for me, because it took a class with someone named Franca Boag, who's who's teaching at MacEwan University now. And it was the anthropology of science. And it was, I think, shortly after, like the Socal affair, where he like that, that scholar submitted, like a sort of fake paper to a postmodern journal, and he got it published. And then he revealed that he had, like, it was fake. And a, it's like the science wars had just just kind of wrapped up. And so I came in, and like 2014, I was like, what? Science Wars? But I but that was where I learned for the first time, you know, that there was a whole field of study of like science and technology studies, that was questioning science. And so we're reading like Thomas Kuhn and all that, you know, and like these people, and that's where I first encountered Latour, and, and I realized, like, wait a minute, I work in a lab. I'm one of these human, you know, humans shaping science, and it opened doors for me. So not that anthropology was a perfect place to go, because there was still, like, we were still forced to take like physical anthropology classes that still reify like physical characteristics. And I mean, at least they were teaching the problems in that in that and they were, you know, we learned about eugenics. And you know, so like, at least they were critiquing it, but I'm not here to defend anthropology in any way. So to fast forward, I found myself doing a PhD in anthropology, mainly because it was a space that appeared to be open to doing kind of like Indigenous work. It's debatable whether that was actually the case, my PhD, it was a really hard experience, but it, you know, it opened certain doors for me. And there was a turn in the last 20 years in anthropology towards something called like, multispecies ethnography. And it became very trendy for anthropologists to work on animals. And so I just happened to kind of be there at the time that this movement was very, very popular. And so when I said I wanted to work on fish, people were like, absolutely, totally sure. I don't think they necessarily expected me to go the direction I would, where I was also like, and also anthropology must be dismantled or white anthropology must be dismantled. You know, like, they were hoping I would just do a nice little phenomenological study of the fishiness of a place and, and, you know, be done with that. And, but then, you know, I really went in some different directions, but I can't complain. Like I've been so lucky. I've been funded, people have supported me. You know, who may have gone on to regret it because it wasn't quite what they thought they were getting. But I've just been really fortunate to connect with amazing people through that experience and to connect with amazing, like Indigenous scholars as well. And so the answer is like I, I practice anthropology, but my projects, everything we're working on is deeply interdisciplinary. So we have like, journalists and architects and scientists and community leaders. And so I take what's useful. This is what Kim TallBear often says, like, she takes what's useful from anthropology, but she leaves the rest. And so you know, and I really take that to heart because she does brilliant work. And she's been able to kind of take some aspects of it that are useful. But I don't I, you know, I haven't read Margaret Mead. I have had to teach some, you know, some critiques of her and my classes. But, yeah, like, I'm not, I'm not someone who would like die to defend anthropology as a discipline. But there's some really cool anthropologists doing covert, the some really cool like the Association of Black anthropologists in the US, like in the American anthropology Association, like there's so many cool anthropologists, who were critiquing and dismantling the harmful aspects of the discipline. So I don't want to throw it all away, because I do think there's really cool stuff happening. But yeah, so to answer your question, I kind of just fell into it. And then, you know, there were aspects of it that were useful that felt less harmful than biology. But I've come back around to working much more closely with the sciences, again, just from a very different angle. Patty What’s fish anthropology? Zoe Well, I would say like in, like, so I like my PhD work was in the community of Paulatuk in the Northwest Territories. And I spend time hanging out with fishermen, just learning about how they've been applying their own laws to protect fish in their homelands. And so. So in that sense, like, the thing that anthropology offers, that some other disciplines don't, is just, it affords a lot of time to just hang out and listen to people tell their own stories. And it really values that, it values that experience of like people telling stories in their own words, and spending time with people, you know, working in, you know, the context that they work in. And so those aspects of it, I think, can be helpful if they're approached, you know, thoughtfully, and with a very clear understanding of the harms of the discipline and a decolonial, you know, need for decolonization. But yeah, like I I think part of the reason it's so weird to keep rehashing my PhD is I hope that nobody from that program listens. I mean, I have long since forgiven them, I have, I have, like, you know, spiritually forgiven them. I have no, I have no anger. But I think that, like, where was I going with that? I think that yeah, there's aspects of it that can be very useful. And, and just the opportunity to spend time with people is really valuable. And one of the things that was hard about my thesis, I think that's why they struggled with it was that I wasn't just doing something that was legible to them, I was also going into the archives and looking at like, you know, 60 years worth of correspondence between the RCMP and the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, and other government and church actors who are talking about, you know, concerns about, you know, the fur trade economy had collapsed in the region in the 1930s. And they were worried about how people were going to get food. And then fish become this really important role in that story, because people were able to continue fishing, even when other species were, you know, periodically scarce. And an elder that I had worked with, through that project named Annie had repeatedly reminded me that she said, You never go hungry in the land if you have fish. And each time she shared that I was like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. And then this other aspect of it would unfold, you know, as we were out on the land, or even years later, I think back to that I'm like yet, this is why we have to protect fish, because they're one of the species that has been in abundance since time immemorial, even for at least in the Arctic, and also in the prairies. And, and for them to be in decline right now in the ways that they are is really alarming. And so Leroy Little Bear points that out as well. He's you know, they, they've survived longer than the dinosaurs longer than Neanderthals. Fish have been around as well, about half a billion years, but they're barely surviving white supremacist colonial capitalism. So that should tell us something that if something can survive all these other cataclysms, but it can't survive this, that something. So, I don't know if that answers the question about, like, why anthropology? How did the fish fit in, but that sort of the fish you know, I had done this very quantitative research in my masters or we did interviews and, and surveys and sort of asked questions about how people were navigating different, you know, economic and social impacts on their harvesting lives. And it was through that experience that people Paulatuk friends were taking me out on the line to go fishing. And, and, and so women in the community said, you know, you know, not a lot of people have asked us about our fishing lives, and we have a lot of knowledge. And so I, you know, when I started my PhD, I asked, you know, would you be interested if I did a project where I spend time with you, you know, learning about your fishing lives? And and they said, Yes, of course. So, so it started out actually as a project on women and fishing, but then it grew into this project on law. And it really, that was sort of like where it landed. Patty Neat. That's, that's really interesting. So, because you had made a comment, centering Indigenous legal orders, and you've talked about this, too, but Indigenous law, can you just explain that a little bit? Zoe Yeah, so um, so two of the big biggest sort of people who are working on these topics in Canada are Val Napoleon and John Burrows, and they're at the University of Victoria. And, you know, when I was nearing the end of my PhD, and I was still struggling to sort of frame the stories that people were sharing with me within the literature that was available to me in we call it North Atlantic anthropology. So like UK, US, Canada, anthropology. And, and then I heard John Burrows, give a talk, where he talked about the dynamic but rooted aspects of Indigenous law. And it just like blew my mind. Like I just was like, of course, Indigenous people have law like I had been so like, my mind frame was so colonized that, like, I couldn't see the law around me. And Val Napoleon wrote a paper in 2007, that basically describes the same experience for some of her students who sort of like when she's taught teaching, when she was teaching Indigenous law. Some students were really struggling to see the norms and protocols that we use in our communities as law. And when I started to read her work, and John's work, and Tracy Lindbergh and other people's work, I realized, like, oh, all of these protocols that people were talking about within my PhD research are law and I so I had conversations with friends about like, you know, does it make sense for me to talk about this as law? And my friend said, Yes. And, you know, in applying to his own harvesting life, and then I realized, like, wait a minute, I also grew up with Indigenous law as a Métis person, and I didn't understand that that's what it was. And and I'm not saying I fully understand what Métis law looks like, because I think there's just a lot of questions that I can't answer, but, you know, Val, Tracy, I was at a conference where Val, Tracy Lindbergh, Patti LaBoucane-Benson, John Burrows and a whole bunch of other people presented. And Patti LaBoucane-Benson and Tracy Lindbergh had talked about Cree law, and how you know, through what they've been taught from elders and knowledge keepers, they work with, like one of the first laws in Cree law, at least on the prairies is love. And then everything sort of built on that and and any mischaracterizations are my own. So, I apologize to people who have far more teachings than me. And I only know a little tiny bit. But those were experiences that really shaped me because I started to understand well, of course, like this, and Val’s work has really focused a lot also on stories, and how stories contain law and like, you know, instructions and guidance and, and that just that completely shifted how I was thinking about the work I was doing in Paulatuk and the stories that were shared with me. And it has gone on to shape. How I think about the work my team and I are doing now about how do we, how do we shift public perceptions of our responsibility to fish just sort of collectively, like Indigenous and non Indigenous communities in Alberta, especially where we're dealing with .. almost every fish population in Alberta is in trouble in one way or another. And so, you know, one of the questions we were asking in our work is, well, what would it look like if we, if we really focused on fish stories, both Indigenous and non Indigenous and what if we and this is a concept we get both from Robin Wall Kimmerer, but also from Kutcha Zimbaldi where we say we want to re-story fish futures. We want to re-story fish habitats through stories. And you know, and what I've learned from Val Napoleon and all these other amazing thinkers is that of course, stories are components of law. She cites Louis Byrd, who, who says stories are good to think with. And that is a sentiment that other people have sort of echoed it, like Julie Cruickshank has said that and Dell Hymes all these people, you know, stories are good to think with. And so that's what we're trying to bring into our work on protecting freshwater fish in Alberta and beyond, is, well what stories do we tell about fish and, and then when we start from that place of telling stories about fish, you start to sort of learn little bits about like, different experiences people are having, and and when you bring those stories together, then you're having really interesting conversations of like, what what do people in Edmonton experience of the fish, they may not see them, because so many populations have been impacted by urban development. And in the 1950s, Edmonton still put raw sewage in the North Saskatchewan. And so, you know, I don't know if I’m making sense. So but for me, Indigenous law, you know, dying from the work that folks that you Vic and Alex are doing, Val Napoleon sort of says law, I wish I could pull the quote directly, but there's a series of videos that they've produced for the Indigenous Law Research Unit. And, and one of them, Val gives us really elegant explanation of what law is, and see if I can, if I can paraphrase it from memory, you know, it's sort of to the effect that law is the way that we, like think together and reason together, and work through, like problems together. And so that's something we're trying to capture in our work is how do we work through, you know, the experience of being people together? Patty Well, Kerry, that makes me think of like, because it Kerry’s Caribbean, you know, and you know,  fish. Kerry I'm so funny, you brought that up, because that was exactly what I was thinking now one of my native islands, my father is from Barbados. And so we have the migration of the flying fish, it's actually one of our national dishes, Zoe Amazing Kerry And, you know, I that is such an integral part of who we are as Bajan people, and, and just what is our space of, of existence, like the migration of the flying fish comes through, and it used to set even the patterns for how we existed I remember my grandmother of my grandfather used to fish but he was more like a, it was more a hobbyist thing for him. But he'd go out onto the waters early, early mornings, right? And, or they go down by the fish markets, and then gather the fish and come home, come back to the house. And then we would all the women in particular, we would all get together and clean and you know, have our conversations around this frying fish. And then we make like what we call cou cou, which is our national dish. It's like a cornmeal dish, which is very much a something that Africans brought over as slaves. And we make this corn meal that you eat with it, and you'd eat cou cou and flying fish. And so when you when we think about the numbers and the scarcity that is happening, because I know even the migration patterns are starting to shift in Barbados. And it's not in the same abundance, you know, our oceans are being affected all over the world. And I had never, you really brought it home to me. The reality that the fish have survived, you know, cataclysm, they've, comets have hit the Earth. destroyed, you know, atmospheres, and fish have survived. And yet, that is a humbling thing to sit and think that we are in such a fragile point in our existence, that if our fish go, I had never even put it into that perspective until it well, I've thought it but you really brought it home for me. And even for me that the fragility of the patterns of our lives. You know, when I think Barbados I immediately think frying fish, like the two are synonymous for me. And all of that is shifting and changing in the way that we're in our experience now. So, yeah, it's humbling in a lot of ways. Patty Well and the eel. I know we talked, I've talked with Aylan Couchie. She's doing some work. She was doing some work on eels and how they used to migrate from the Caribbean. Up down this up the coast down the St. Lawrence Seaway up the Trent water system all the way to Lake Nipissing. And now of course with you know, with the with the canals and the way things are closed off, that connection so the eel features in artwork and stories all the way from Nipissing to the Caribbean. And just the ways that connects us even though we may not have had contact in any other way, the eels did, the eels carried our stories with them. And there's just yeah, it's just really sad. So I just think it's really cool that you're, you know, you're working with on stories there are stories about fish, and I saw how excited you got Zoe I love fish stories!  *laughter* Kerry I was just leaning into that. See how much of a passion it is for you. And it's delightful. It absolutely is delightful to see you just like the people weren't listening to the podcast, she lifts up. Space, our zoom call was lit up with the effervescence of Zoe as she is talking about this. And it's that passion, though, that I also want to mention, because I think that's the stuff that saves this space. I think it's you talking about it with that kind of exuberance with that kind of passion that is actually caused me to be interested in ways that I might not have been before. And it's only I think, with this interest with us calling this to light that maybe we can shift what is happening because as you said, this is gonna affect all of us in the long run. Zoe I don't know that I want to be on a planet without fish. Like, because that is a that is the Kerry Could we even be on a planet without fish. Zoe And I don't know, I don't know, that was like humans have never existed without fish fish have existed without us. We haven't existed without them. And yeah, neither, you know. And it, there's a there's a lot of people who are really passionate about fish. Like I am inspired by my late stepdad who was a biologist who was just deeply passionate about fish. And, you know, it's like, there's a lot of really cool people working on these things. But for you know, any of those other people, it's like, it's worms or snakes or bees, or for me, it's fish, like I just, you know, and I love hearing fish stories like now it's like, Oh, I've never seen a flying fish, you know, and I, they, I bet they're amazing. I bet they’re so amazing. Kerry They're really long. Their fins look like literally like wings, and they're long and they're kind of majestic, right? They're tiny, they're not that big, but their fins take up like double the space of them. And they're really cool, when you see the whole thing, and then we used to like cut them open, and then they would be seasoned up, they taste really delicious to kind of a meaty fish. There's, as I said, like, with even that conversation, look at all the memories, I'm thinking of my grandmother and being in her kitchen, and her directing me on to how you know the precision cut, to make to be able to skin it perfectly to pull the spine out so that the fillet stayed together. And you know, the recipe that went into sometimes you because sometimes you would bread them. And so you know that all of those memories and, and even that with it, sometimes we'd eat split peas, that we would that would be harvested from the garden and just peas from the garden that we would have grown. And so all of those memories get tied into that space of when I'm thinking about these fish, and what it meant to the enormity of the experience of my grandmother who is now an ancestor. You know, it's, it's important because it is more than just our survival. These are our memories, these are our histories, these are the things that have created the very space of who we are as humans, as relatives, as families, as mothers, as fathers, our societies. And I just I just I'm recognizing how interconnected and yet fragile those connections are. We truly have to respect our fish relatives. They created so much of who I am today. Patty Well, and that's that relationship right just you know, going back to the thing with the Kim had said that identity without relationship is just such an empty impoverished thing. You know, we go to the grocery store and you know, and it's it's just so thin when you when you, you know when you really think about it and dig into it and you know, and you spent that time hearing their stories and seeing how the I don't love that they said, Nobody asks us our stories. They're like, Hey, would you like me to ask you and they’re like,yeah! Zoe All the scientists are coming like at that time now more fishing work has happened, which is great, like people need to like. Everyone should be able to do fish work. But at the time, like most of the climate change scientists and the wildlife biologists who are coming up, we're really focused on like the megafauna, the charismatic megafauna, so they're coming up, and they want to know about polar bears and care about and like, all of those are incredibly important species. So I'm not here to diminish that. But, you know, the thing that was exciting about fishing and I think I've tried to remember the name, there was a woman who had written a, like her PhD thesis. You know, before me at Aberdeen and she worked in the eastern Canadian Arctic in Nunavut. And you know, her finding was that everybody wishes. It's not just then you know, it's kids it's it's, it's an intergenerational like, joyful thing that people participate in, in, in the, in Nunavut. And that was very true in Paulatuk, as long as still is like fishing is just a really big part of community life. And I was so lucky to get to spend time, you know, and I really have to credit my friends Andy and Millie Thrasher, and their family who took me out fishing, through that whole time that I was there and took me to lots of their favorite fishing places, and I just got to spend time with them, like their family. And it was a lot like spending time with my dad, my Métis dad teaching me how to fish you know, on small lakes in Alberta, much smaller lakes much different and it was in Paulatuk is so cool, because like, I write about this in one of my articles are like Millie really took my nalgene just, like, dipped it into one of the lakes and was like, Here, here's some water, just that like that incredible experience of like, well, I can just drink straight out of this lake. Like, just the difference in, you know, what that feels like? And that that's the experience people used to have all the time. You know, and so in different places, so I just, yeah, I'm really thankful for it. You know, I just, that was a really amazing experience and, and Patty This is bringing to mind I look, I listened to the Media Indigena (https://mediaindigena.com/) podcast. And a lot a while ago, Candis Callison was talking about really missing the salmon from home. That because she's Tahltan from Northern BC, and she was talking about really missing the salmon from home that, you know, it tastes different, because it eats differently, right. And so what it eats and where it lives affects how it tastes. And salmon isn't just salmon. And I mean, like we live in wine country, right. And so we know that the wine from the one part of the region tastes different from the exact same grapes grown in a different because it’s digging its roots into different stuff. And so and so it tastes, but it was just that anyway, that just called it to mind what she she was talking about that these kind of intense ways that we can be connected to and shaped by place. Zoe Yes, Patty how connected it all is, and how important that is a really, really important that is, and we forget that we've got, I mean, people in the chat are just really loving you Zoe.. Zoe Oh, really doesn't even look good. So I'm like, and the thing that, you know, I think fish can be sites of new memories as well like that. If we work together across many different communities, like fish still have a lot to teach us collectively. You know, my dad has memories when he was a little boy growing up in Edmonton, that it was, it was who he remembers fishing growing up was his friend who was from a Chinese Canadian family who had set lines for suckers, right by the high level bridge. And so, you know, here's my dad, a Métis kid, and his memories of fishing in the city are from Chinese Canadian family. And you know, that kind of like exchange of knowledge in ways that maybe like white settlers weren't really paying attention to who was making relations with the rivers and there's a lot of stories there that I think haven't been explored necessarily about. And so there's I'm forgetting his name. But there was this really cool urbanist in Edmonton who was doing a cool project where he he's from the sort of like the Chinese community in Edmonton, and he was connecting with elders, because both Chinese immigrants and Indigenous community members in Edmonton both relied on the sturgeon and other fish in the river. And so he was collecting stories across both Indigenous and immigrant experience from the like early 1900s, of how people engaged with the river. And so, you know, I am also very, I, you know, I think that there's restorying to be done to that displaces the white settler imaginary, that they are the voice of the fish, that actually so many other communities also have relationships with fish, and that those stories don't get centered and a lot of the like conservation science and other narrative, you know, there is that real dichotomy like the you were talking about duality versus dichotomy, I was catching up on some of your tweets today. And you're really good points about. So I want to make sure I use the right terminology, that I'm not doing the conflating that you were pointing out, but that, you know, there's a, that settler Indigenous duality, or dichotomy gets emphasized in a lot of conservation work in Canada, to the exclusion of Black histories and other histories that are really important to understanding who has relationships to the water, who has relationships to the fish. And so, yeah, I just think that that's another reason like, fish stories are so exciting to me, because everyone has some kind of story, whether it's beautiful stories, like Kerry’s, or, you know, some people don't like fish and don't have a positive relationship to it. And that's okay to like that. You know, that. But that fish, I keep, you know, instead of say, like, one of my little tag lines for our work is like every part of Canada is a fish place. Just to remind, you know, the government that they can't, they can't, you know, sort of recklessly harm fish habitats, you know, in the name of economic development that, you know, like, the fish shaped this country, you know, yeah, yeah. Patty This has been so interesting. Like really surprisingly, interesting because I find your Twitter threads so interesting. And I was really intrigued by an anthropologist who studies fish. That made no sense. Now I understand how those two things go together. And now I'm kind of like, well, of course that goes together. Kerry I definitely got to follow you on Twitter. I I need to know can you shout you out for anybody else who's listening? Zoe @ZoeSTodd Kerry Dr. Dr. Fish philosopher. Yes. Zoe I do have a doppelganger named Zoe H. Todd. And I just have to give her a little credit. Because she did her degree at Carleton. Right. She graduated right when I was hired. And then she moved to Edmonton when I moved to Ottawa, and so we, and sometimes she works. I think she's currently working for PBS in the US. And people will email me and be like, you've did such an incredible story on the news. And I'm like, It's not me. It's the other Zoe Todd. She's brilliant, follow her. Patty I just really feel like this was an intro to Kerry absolutely, Patty You know, to the work that you do and to the things that the important things about the ways that the waters connect us and the fish and I mean, I'm thinking about all the memory that fish nation holds. Right, like right from, you know, I read Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumb, which is fish, it's mammals. But still, they're in water. And, you know, the relationships and the memories that they hold. Some of these beings are so old, right? Like they, they're 200 years old, some of these whales and you know, what kind of memories of us are they holding and, you know, just these extraordinary lives and stories. And so I just, I'm just so this was just so much fun. You're just .. Kerry I absolutely loved it you on fresh air. It was an amazing, amazing talk. Zoe I just want to give a little shout out there's a ton of people doing cool fish work. So Deb McGregor at York. Tasha Beads who's a Water Walker and doing her PhD at Trent and there's a there's a scholar named Andrea Reed at UBC who's doing really cool coastal fish stuff and yeah, there's just a really cool people and then my whole fish freshwater fish futures (https://freshwaterfishfutures.ca/) team like Janelle Baker. I just just really cool people. They want to make sure they get credit because they're doing cool stuff. Patty Thank you guys so much. Kerry Till next time, Zoe till next time, have a great day. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit medicinefortheresistance.substack.com (https://medicinefortheresistance.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   22 Apr 2022

   A colonized sky

   Patty Krawec  so I just finished reading The Disordered Cosmos by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein so then when I came across Hilding, came across Hilding a few weeks ago about Indigenous stargazing. Mi’kmaq astronomer and tell us about yourself and about Indigenous stargazing. Hilding Neilson Yeah, so I'm Hilding, I'm Mi’kmaq and settler from a group in Newfoundland. That's where my family's from the west coast of the island. Got my PhD at the University of Toronto in astrophysics, did some research back as a contract backdating astronomer, working in the Department of Astronomy, just next door to AW Peet. And I've been really interested in trying to bridge a lot of initiatives in astronomy that we don't really talk about that much, which is Indigenous knowledges. If I were to show you a textbook, you know, like a 500 page tome of astronomy knowledge from cosmology, the exoplanet, there'd be two pages on Indigenous knowledges. And we'd be sharing those two pages with Stonehenge, and New Grange in Ireland. And they'll be talking about perhaps the Mayan Astronomy, or maybe Hawai’ian navigators. And it will be spoken about as if we're past tense, as if Indigenous people don't exist. And then it will be like, “now on to the real science.” And, you know, a few years ago, I got to attend a national meeting of Canadian astronomers, and a Cree astronomer educator, Wilfer Buck, was presenting, and he gave a talk to the audience, discussing all these Cree stories, beautiful Cree stories. The Bear constellation with three dog constellation. And us seeing all this knowledge that we don't talk about in academic spaces. And I'm just sitting there wondering like, WTF is our knowledge? Where's Indigenous wisdom, Mi’kmaq knowledge? Where are the constellations? Why don't we talk about that? And so this sort of became of this giant rabbit hole that I've been going through trying to find different knowledges and Indigenous methodologies, and trying to create new space in academic astronomy for more Indigenous knowledges, though, granted, that mostly focused on the North American Carolinian peoples. There's just too much out there to try to do everything. And so hopefully now in the fall, we'll be launching our new course on Indigenous astronomy, that will be a senior level course talking of issues around colonization and astronomy, whether that's dealing with telescopes on Earth or going out to Mars, talking about knowledges, and then Indigenous methodologies. You know, how would an Indigenous, how would Indigenous peoples think about the concepts like the Drake Equation. Like we asked the question, how many advanced civilizations are there? And, noting that “advanced civilization” has its own problems with terminology, are there in our galaxy? And, you know, some dude named Frank Drake in the 1960s came up this whole way of kind of thinking about this through an equation. And all the assumptions presently require things like, what's intelligent life? How does life form? What is a civilization? And if we just step back and think back to, you know, how different Indigenous communities would think about these things and what does that mean? And there are ways of going through these kind of thought processes. One of the simple aspects of the Drake Equation is, you know, how long civilizations sort of last that can communicate. And Frank Drake, you know, was doing this during the Cold War. So, you know, the biggest fear was nuclear bombs. So he was suggesting maybe a century to 1000 years that's the length societies exist Now that we're in the era of climate change, probably, the same numbers apply. But, you know, I remember when seeing this meme a few years ago of “Canada- 150;  Mi’kmaq- 13,000.” Patty Krawec: Right. Hilding Neilson: So you know, if Western civilization’s got about a century, perhaps Indigenous civilizations have 10s of 1000s of years. Hilding Neilson And you know, that's tens of thousands of  years longer to exist. It means many more Indigenous type, or Indigenous life possibilities of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy. So just thinking from an Indigenous perspective, using–and trying not to really be pan-Indigenous–But, you know, common methodologies that you can have so many more civilizations in our galaxy, if you think about it, through those lenses of different Indigenous nations relative to traditional western science. And we could probably play through this exercise through different elements in astronomy and physics. And I think this sort of helped create this critical lens, again, around how we talk about astronomy and astrophysics, because it's become so Eurocentric, so westernized, so much in this narrative of “Space Cowboys, Colonizing Mars, Planting a flag, Sending messages out to other worlds,” that were really embodied within the same colonial narrative in the last four or five centuries, that I think we're due now to actually start thinking about it from a from a broader context. Patty Krawec There were two things that Chanda talked about, and I kind of tweeted about it. Because one of the things that she mentions, is Euclidean, she's talking about Euclidean geometry, just you know, to bring it way down to super simple stuff. For all the non-physicists in the room. What she's talking about is that we're thinking in terms of, you know, Euclidean geometry is, you know, squares have a certain number of angles inside them. And triangles always add up to 180. But then, when we map that onto a curved space, that doesn't work, the triangle no longer adds up to 180. And yet, we live on a curved planet, underneath a curved sky. And we think in terms of these, you know, of these flat, you know, these these flat geometries, which got me thinking, you know, which got me thinking about the way colonisation worked, carving up the countries into these little squares to give away chunks of land. And they're carving up spaces that are curved, you know, they're carving rivers in half, and hills in half. And, you know, just because the lines match up, and they're mapping this grid and starting this, this disconnection, and we do that to the sky, we kind of chart it off in ways that aren't super helpful. I mean, they're helpful if you want to lay claim to it, if you want to, like you say, plant your flag in it, then it's very helpful to map it out that way. But in terms of relationship, in terms of understanding how things connect together, is not super helpful. So how does, I guess, how does the night sky change? When we look at it through Indigenous eyes? Hilding Neilson I think if we look at the night sky, and start the traditional Greco Roman, we have all these constellations defined by this International Astronomical Union. So ADA constellations. And this was done on, around the beginning of the 1900s, by a British guy, a German guy and a French guy. So it’s a bad joke already. And when this happened, they kind of, like you said, they carved it up. They used Greek stories, they made up and borrowed some constellations from different parts, particularly for the southern hemisphere, where they completely imported their own belief system into those constellations. But in doing so, they also sanitized a lot of the Greek and Roman stories. You know, there are Greek and Roman stories for Ursa Major, Ursa Minor and Cepheus, and all these different constellations. But when we did this mapping, which was solely for convenience for people with telescopes, who want to do the observing and had to know where to look, it became, turned into nothing. You know, it took all the, it took our connections away from it, from a European,in the European sense. And when that became transplanted over here, you know, the Mi’kmaq, where there's Ursa Major, the Mi’kmaq also have a bear constellation. The Cree have a Bear constellation. Lots of cultures in the world have bear constellations around what we would call the Big Dipper today. Patty Krawec: Really, we all looked at that and saw a bear. Hilding Neilson Many, yeah, to many, it's a bear and hunters. Patty Krawec: That’s neat. Hilding Neilson: A bear in a tail, sometimes bear and cubs. There's a lot of commonalities like that. And, but the problem is that this was designed solely to erase Indigenous cultures and Indigenous knowledges. And for me, like the Mi’kmaq, for many Indigenous peoples in what is today Canada, you know, what is in the sky, it's kind of a reflection of the land below; your knowledge is localized. And so if we basically say that constellation is Ursa Major, and your knowledge doesn't count, that's all about removing us, removing us from the land, just as much of that–maybe not as much as actually literally removing us from the land, but it's, it's part of that disconnection. And, and so that erasure is a part of the problem. And I think that, you know, for my own self, like, I didn't get to grow up within a community, you know, most people, most Mi’kmaq in Newfoundland, we were kind of away from most of the communities. Just where Newfoundland was. And in that respect, you know, how do we kind of understand those constellations? Yeah, I only know one or two Mi’kmaq constellations. I don't think I can name all 88 European constellations, but I can name a lot of them. I could probably name a few of the Cree constellations, thanks to, you know, listening to Wilfred Buck and reading his stories. And so trying to reclaim that knowledge is also kind of important, because that's part of our connection to the land. And you know, what, the constellations I see here, where I'm sitting in Toronto, or Tkaronto, are different than if I go to the far north, or if I go to the southern hemisphere. You know, if I go to Australia, the moon looks completely different. You know, for someone coming from Australia to here, the moon looks like it's upside down, and vice versa. And so the stories change, and our connection and our relations to these, to these special objects change. And that's, that's one of the unfortunate repercussions of the legacy of colonization with respect to the night sky. And then another thing, I think, relates to that, not just the constellations, but it's the light pollution. Patty Krawec Oh, yes. Hilding Neilson: So, you know, I like to joke, you know, I live in Toronto, if I step out onto my balcony, I might see five stars in the night. One of them might be on CBC TV. You know, they, they're just so few you can see. So you just lose that connection in this void of installedl light? Patty Krawec: Yes. Hilding Neilson: And how do we, you know, so I can't see the Milky Way, or what in Mi’kmaq would be a spirit road, which is also a spirit path for many other cultures, you know? So how do you connect to the ancestors, in that respect. all these things.. Patty Krawec Really, that's actually a really interesting point. Then eventually, I'll let Kerry get a word in edgewise. She's just here smiling and nodding and taking it all in the way she does. Because that's something like when I think about language, right, there's something residential schools took from us. And then if, you know, so if, in your cosmology, you believe that you need to speak the language, or the spirits won't understand what you're saying, how do you show gratitude? They can't hear you. And then if you die, and you don't speak the language, then the spirits won't recognize you. And so removing language in that way, you know, kind of cuts us off. And then as you were talking about not being able to see the night sky, the, you know, the stars, are our ancestors, and after reading Chanda’s book, they are in a very real sense. You know, really, you know, they really are our ancestors, they really are our relatives, you know, in a very literal kind of way, you know, very material kind of way. But that light pollution, that also cuts us off from them, cuts us off from being able to see them in the way that our, you know, our ancestors walking this earth, saw and understood themselves to exist. You know, kind of beneath the sky in relation in relationship to the sky. So that's, yeah, she asks that in her book, like what would it take for our communities to see, to see the stars. What would it take? Reflecting on her own having to be driven outside of LA for a, you know, two, three hour drive to be able to see. What would it take for our children, you know, for our communities? What changes do we need to make for them to be able to see the night sky? We're going to the National Park in Nova Scotia this summer, and I found out that it's a dark sky preserve. So I had to rearrange our travel plans, so that we will be there during the new moon so well, there's no moon and there'll be no moon in the sky. I've never seen the stars like that. This is going to be amazing. Hilding Neilson: Yeah. Patty Krawec: And I'm 55. And I've, and there will be a whole night sky that I've never experienced, that my father had. My father did, from growing up in northern Ontario. Like, it's that, it's that tangible. It’s that recent. For a lot of us. Not for all of us, but for a lot of us. Hilding Neilson: Yeah, no, I mean, you know, I haven't been home to visit my family, since before the, these end times, COVID. And, you know, when going home and seeing the night sky and seeing what is essentially billions of lights over your head, it's completely transforming and different and far more reassuring. In my mind, it's like, it feels more like a blanket. And, you know, there's a greater universe, there's relations, you know, Western science did get it right when Carl Sagan said we are made, we are made of star stuff. Just like Cree people, we are star, you know, star people. You know, it's all true. And we have that connection when you're sitting in Toronto and just basking in that eerie orange glow. You know, I think we miss out on so much. And I think it also negatively impacts how we, how we understand things like astronomy, physics. Even from a Western sense, the great, the great astronomers in Europe or even in, you know, China and India. And, you know, if you only think about it from true, purely Indigenous North American sense, you know, everyone had that kind of perspective of the night sky, they could observe it. If they had the telescopes or lenses or instruments, they can see these things, learn to connect, and figure out how they want to connect with it. Whereas today, in Toronto, there's no way to connect to the night sky. Unless I want to use a computer and then log onto a planetarium software. That's sort of what I think that's sort of what our children have to deal with today is, it's easier to see the constellations through a computer software than it is to go outside. Patty Krawec Well, and even what they see is filtered right? Like I've got that Stargaze, that star map app on my phone. So because I don't, I can recognize the Big Dipper on a good night. Really I’m not very good at it. Hilding Neilson: I’m honestly not much better. Patty Krawec: But you know, I hold up my phone, and I can find it, I can find it that way. And I kind of map out “Oh, that's where this is. And that's where that is.” But they're all…They're not the Cree constellations. You know, they're not…they're not the Igbo, or Yoruba constellations. They're not the Anishinaabe constellations; they're not the way our ancestors would have seen the night sky. They're organized and collated in a way, you know, in a European way. And all those disconnected stories. Hilding Neilson: 28:04 Our constellations aren't static, either. I mean, sometimes, you know, in Mi’kmaq, we have the story of the bear, and the bear changes throughout the year. You know, in the winter, the bear is on his back, as a spirit, and in the summer, it’s running across the land. Some of the constellations have different meanings at different times of the year, whereas the European constellations are static, kind of locked in forever, or as forever as they want it to be. So, you know, I think we've kind of missed out on a lot of dynamic aspects of these constellations that come from the motions of the Earth around the Sun, or the rotation of the earth. And motions of sky around us. And so so there's a lot, I think, a lot more depth in eliminating Indigenous constellations that we don't see. Relative to the European. Kerry Goring I, this conversation is… I'm loving so many points, there's so many things that you guys have touched that I've kind of been like, yeah, right. Um, what comes to mind for me when I think about it, is how, what you mentioned very early on, the idea of building of, of the erasure, you know, the way that when you were talking about that $500 500 Page textbook, that would just, you know, mention maybe two pages of the ancient ways or of Indigenous cultures showing up in those books. And what I find fascinating about that, is that we know that ancient cultures actually are, actually really had mapping and stargazing down to a science, down to a detailed finite way that they were building architecture and buildings to map and and offer that space up. And so it's kind of like a little tiny bit of a pet project, but I really enjoy talking about this from an ancient space. And what comes to mind for me is even these knowledges that weren't, or Europeans have suppressed or have not allowed, or colonization has suppressed and not allowed us to expand into. Take, for example, the Dogon tribe, which is an African tribe that existed and was kind of, was very much removed from, you know, civilization or from colonialism until the early 1900s. And I'm sure you can explain a lot more about this, but they knew about the constellation or the the star system, Sirius, sorry, they knew about Sirius B, was it? Was it that they found and could map Sirius B before Europeans even knew it existed, and they speak about it from their own ancient traditions, you know, it goes into a whole other realm, which I'm really into. But the idea that they were given the gifts from their, you know, from their gods that came down and told them how to map the star systems. And they had no modern day interactions to be able to have known that it existed, except for from some sort of knowledge that must have been ancient to them. And I think about when we talk about this, this idea of the erasure, how much of the truth of how the history of our planet, the history of our species, understanding the relationships that exists between us, the stars, space and the universe, are being affected, because we have been narrowed down and washed down into–what I love Patty, when you were talking about the idea of a two dimensional space–instead of knowing the curvature of our lands, and knowing the curvature of the skies? How much of us is not being met, or the truth of us is being so lost in those spaces? Hilding Neilson: Definitely true, I've heard the story of the Dogon, and to put it in context, Sirius A is one of the brightest stars in the night sky, and Sirius B is what's called a white dwarf star, which is really small, compact, and is essentially the dead remainder of a star that has lost most of its material. And so today, you can only really see Sirius B with the telescope. Now, I don't really know much about the Dogon story, because, as I understand, it came through from French anthropologists, and as soon as I hear the word anthropologist, I tend to tune out. But yeah, that is very possible, and very likely, they did know better, because it might have been a star bright enough to the human eye 10,000 years ago, or 20,000 years ago, or even 100,000 years ago. And there are stories like that that come up all the time. You know, there are stories of a Paiute story from the West Coast about how the North Star came to be. And it is a son of the chief who's climbing a mountain, loves climbing mountains. And he finds this really hard peak to climb. And he keeps going around in circles, circles, and circles trying to find a way up the mountain but it’s so hard. Eventually he finds an opening and goes through the cave, and climbs away to the top. But unfortunately, when he gets to the top, there was a, there was an avalanche and the cave closed and he's trapped on the mountain. And that story can literally be interpreted as procession of the star. Because our what we call the North Star today wasn't always the North Star. It had to go around and around around. And so we see these long time domains. And that's one of the things that's very valuable in astronomy. There are stories in Anishinaabe, about heartberry stars, which are red supergiants, that change brightness. And the same very similar stories are seen in different Indigenous Australian nations about these things. And a ton of Indigenous knowledge is carried so much time domain, that, you know, if I think, you know, if Western astronomers just sat down and listened, we would learn a lot about these knowledges and about the history of the universe. Because it was only a couple centuries ago where we were, where the popular dogma was that the astronomy or space was static, and that it was unchanging. But yeah, that wasn't part of, I think, the Indigenous way. Patty Krawec What's possible just to come back, you know, to what you had said about you know, when you hear anthropologist, you kind of, because yeah, I mean, they just they get so much wrong because they've got this particular lens that they're trying to jam the story into. So because then like the Anishinaabeg word for North actually means “goes home” and it contains, according to elders, it contains the idea of the glaciers going home, which meant we knew that they weren't always, you know, so during the last ice age, we knew that they had come from the north and gone back, which suggests knowledge of well over, you know, you know, 10-15,000 years because we didn't just know they were there, we knew where they'd come from, we knew that they went back. So it's the same, you know, with the star, maybe they knew it 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 years ago, their language contained the story of this star that is no longer visible, but it was back then. And so when the French anthropologist heard it, they're like, Oh, the stars have always looked like this. Therefore, these people couldn't have figured it out on their own. It must have been aliens telling them about it. Must have been… Hilding Neilson: Yeah Patty Krawec: couldn't have known it themselves, and yet, they did. so that's really, but I hadn't put those things together. That's really neat. So yeah, and we're. Yeah, so we had a question in the chat. So if you could, I don't even know what it means. But I'm gonna, I'm gonna let you answer that. Hilding Neilson: If we look at the Western constellation Orion, on one of the shoulders was a very red star called Betelgeuse. And this is a famous red supergiant that is near the end of its life. And when it finally dies, it's going to explode as a supernova. And it’s going to be so bright, we'll probably see during the day. Like it'd be, it could be about as bright as Venus. Patty Krawec: Wow Hilding Neilson: And so this is not the first star that has ever done this, blown up like that. And as opposed to being bright enough and close enough that we could see it. There have been other instances, around the year 1000, there was a star in what was called the Crab Nebula. In terms of Indigenous stories, I've only heard of one. And I can't confirm it, because the times that I was given in the story, don't line up with the astronomical knowledge, but it’s possible. So I was contacted by someone in Mi’kma’ki telling me about the Mi’kmaq flag. And the Mi’kmaq flag is a white flag with a cross and a star and a moon. And the person was telling me that the stars in the moon reflect a catastrophic, catastrophic event or timeframe, where people were struggling and there was starvation. But it was because there was a bright star in the sky that didn't belong there in a constellation that Europe called Cygnus. And he said, this was about 2000 years ago. I was very curious, because the fact that he took, the person told me the constellation, I'm like, I had to look this up. And there is a remnant of a star that was there, but that's, our best estimates’ that it exploded around 20,000 years ago. Now, I don't know, everybody tells time different, stories change. So maybe it's related. We know from more recently, there's a very popular one called the Crab Nebula, which is the explosion about 1000 years ago, that appears on historical records from around the world. It has been linked to the city Cahokia. in what is today Mississippi, I believe, which was a large Indigenous city there. I don't know how true that is. But people have tried to link the two events’ timescales. But as seen, seen a lot of Korean and Chinese texts, where they note that there's a new star in the sky. And so, but funnily enough, it never appeared in European texts that I'm aware of. It has happened, and I think we see these, these stories do occur. I'm not really familiar with too many of them. I'm trying to think if there's any, I can't think of any others off the top of my head. But, you know, even just a few years ago, or a few 100 years ago, you know, the heyday of Isaac Newton, and then, you know, that was a big deal for a lot of astronomers, was to find these new stars, supernovae and so like, you know, Kepler and Deacon Brian and these famous white scientists in Europe, spent time and found a few. Not aware of any stories, Indigenous stories that are being linked to these events. I'm sure they're there. patty krawec  39:16 Yeah, yeah, we just need to listen to the stories and sometimes it's, it's the way we hear them. Right. Like, it's understanding like, remember, we talked with Del Lessin some time ago about they're basically rebuilding the Catawba language. And there was a story about oh, I think it was a rabbit. And it caught, you know, things caught on fire. And it, you know, and it sounded like just kind of this funny story about this rabbit dragging fire through a field. But what it actually contained was agricultural knowledge about agricultural burning. And there was a plant, a sunflower-type plant, that has an edible tuber and required…So the story contains all of this knowledge that they didn't initially recognize because of language loss because of culture loss, it just seemed like an interesting story. And so, you know, that now they understand is actually something that contains agriculture, you know, important agricultural knowledge, which then makes you go back and look at the other stories. What knowledge is in there, that we're not getting, because we've lost so much contact context? and like you had said about the Greek stories and stuff that are put up into the constellation, even those are stripped. You know, even in the process of colonizing the sky, they still stripped meaning from it, we don't even get good stories, we just get kind of these stripped-down, sanitized picture books. But the real story is there, like it's there. And in our stories, in our cosmology, we just need to…we just need to listen differently, and look at and look at them differently. And some of that is… how did you start shifting your lens? Because you talked about not not growing up surrounded, you know, by a Mi’kmaq community. How did you start shifting your lens? Hilding Neilson It really wasn't that long ago. You know, I'm fully trained in the Western system of astronomy. And I think really hit off when I had that interaction with Wilfred Buck, not seeing any Indigenous Knowledges. And then just diving into some of the great works, you know, the works, Murray Battista, Gregory cathead, all these great Indigenous science experts talking about all these different ideas and ways of thinking, and perspectives. And I always have to step back and be like, Whoa, what am I? Why am I doing? Why am I thinking about this question this way? Why am I thinking about stellar physics this way? Or quantum mechanics that way? You know, all these things are coming together. And you kind of have to question, I mean, it's really only been like the last four or five years where I've really been trying to relearn everything. And for the most part, I feel like I've done a whole other PhD. patty krawec  42:19 So let's talk about quantum mechanics for a minute, because that's, or maybe longer, because that’ll take a minute just to explain what that is. Because I was reading Lawrence Gross, and he has this book called Anishinaabe Ways of Knowing and Being, and I have to get it out again, it's actually behind me on my bookshelf, because there's a chapter in there where he talks about how in the Anishinaabe worldview and way of thinking–and the Mi’kmaq and Anishinabeg are cousins. You know, we migrated east and I guess made relatives and came back. So we're, you know, we're cousins, but he says that our worldview is much closer to kind of a quantum mechanic way of understanding things. And I've read his chapter. I've read Chanda. It's still just outside my grasp. Hilding Neilson: Yeah Kerry Goring this is just a really, really smart patty krawec Two people in the chat are like, Wow, I love quantum mechanics. So yeah, do it! Hilding Neilson Yeah, yeah. So quantum mechanics is one of those things I'm always afraid to talk about, because I don't understand quantum mechanics either. I suspect most people in physics and astronomy don't actually understand quantum mechanics, we just do the math and hope for the best. Patty Krawec AW says they are a quantum mechanic. Kerry Goring And that's interesting, because I had just listened… I'm laughing about that, because I had just listened to a talk with a physicist named Sean. What is Sean last name? Hilding Neilson: Sean Carroll? Kerry Goring: Sean Carroll. Yes. And he was talking about that. And I thought it was fascinating that physicists are more concerned with the application, is that a better way of putting it? Versus actually an overall grasp of what they're actually…what actually it is? And that was like mind blowing to me to know that it's, we just assume, there's like this assumption that this works. But nobody's really looked at what makes it work, if that makes…or we're looking at what makes it work, but not why it's there. Does that make sense? Sort of? I think? Hilding Neilson I think it makes perfect sense. I think, I think we do focus a lot on the how it works, as opposed to why it’s doing what it's doing. And I think from very much this, astronomers’ perspective, which is quantum mechanics is something you try to do your best to approximate and not actually work with. You just try to work around it. We think so much from this classical Euclidean sense and quantum mechanics is completely counterintuitive to that. Whereas most Indigenous knowledges that are coming to grasp how everything is very much about relative, like how things relate between you and I. How I observe something is very different from how you observe something, and that both truths can be true. Whereas in the West, we think everything has to be an absolute truth, which defies quantum mechanics because quantum mechanics of the particle has some speed and some place, but you can't really tell which is which. And, and so a lot of these respects, I feel like Indigenous knowledges have an easier time with quantum mechanics, because I think Indigenous knowledge is a little more relaxed about not knowing things; it's okay that there are mysteries. Whereas in the West, having a mystery is the worst thing possible. You know, it, it has to be explainable, has to be reducible. It has to be objective, and, like, I have trouble with quantum mechanics. I listen to Sean Carroll, fairly regularly, you know, I love his, his writing and words, and he signed it as “many worlds theory,” where you get, where if you observe a quantum event, depending on how you observe it, the universe branches. And then like, are we literally increasing the number of universes to help us explain how we don't know something? And we kind of do that we, when we don't understand something locally, we tend to make things bigger. We don't, we don't understand evolution. So we make evolutionary changes smaller, over a longer time, time periods. It works. We don't understand cosmology? Make the universe older. Or you don't understand why cosmology works? So well, we just create a multiverse. You know, one of the explanations of how we're, that we can live in a universe that seems to work, is that there's lots of universes. And there's just so many of these things like that, I think, you know, my understanding of Indigenous people is, we live in a universe that works, where things are just perfect for us to exist, because we exist, it has to be that way. That's how we're related, that's how our relation with the universe. Whereas if you're in the West, you have the axiom that the universe doesn't care about us, that we, you know, the fact that we exist should just be a fluke. For the fact that we live in a universe that’s just right. Can't, doesn't make sense. And I have colleagues who get really stressed out by this question. And given, given to the point, they try to pull out their hair, which, given that no one’s had a haircut in a long time, might be useful. But they just struggle with this, and they don't like it. So sometimes they come up with the multiverse theory where we have, where we are in one universe in a bubble of others. And there are other reasons to expect the multiverse. AW Peet is much more of an expert on that than I am, for instance, I'd rather, I'd rather defer to them. But please let AW jump in. There's just so many of these things that I think Indigenous knowledges learn to accept, because it's part of being in relation. And our relationality is what makes, allows for these things to work. I think with quantum mechanics, it’s a little more difficult, because it's, we also accept there's a mystery, but there is fuzzy truth, when there's multiple truths that can can coexist at the same time. Whereas in the West, everything has to be objectively true. I do experiment, you do experiment, you should get the same answer. Yeah. And that objectivity doesn't quite work. Otherwise. Patty Krawec: Oh, okay. Hilding Neilson: but that's sort of the best I can come up with, by kind of b.s.ing a lot. You know, but Yeah, cuz I'm really speaking not in my best. Yeah. Kerry Goring I love that you, you know, took the attempt, and I think you did beautifully with it. I appreciate you, kind of, tackling it. Because I think what I love about that is it's almost from this layman's space with a plus, because you definitely know more than we do. But what I, when I think about this, and then we put it into the space of our Indigenous, and you know, my Afro-centric cultures, it does come from that acceptance, that mystery is real, and with that, offers the simplicity to be in relation with all of those spaces. And what I mean by “spaces” is the universe, the stars, the earth, how we stand on the earth, the relationship that we have with, you know, the animals on our planes, all of those things have an interconnected sense that is wrapped in the mystery. And so, when we, like, I totally believe in the scientific, scientific method and I, you know, I understand that being a space that we have as a template to work from, but I do sometimes think that that part of it, the idea of the acceptance, that some of it is still to be revealed. And being okay in that is lacking in the way that we exist. And so what happens with that is that it's exactly that idea of disregarding, you know, or just pretending that that mystery isn't valuable. Patty Krawec I had a, I remember when I was in science in grade nine, our science teacher, because it was the only year that I had to take science. We had a teacher who had, we were going over the criteria for life. And I think there's six, I don't remember what they are. Anyway, so we had, we had, there were six criteria for life. And he asked us, you know, you know, he's kind of running us through it, do plants meet it? does this person meet it? Does this, the rocks meet the criteria? And you know, we kind of go through it, And we're like, Nope, they don't. And he asked us again, are you sure? And we're like, oh, is this a trick question? You know, and so we went through them again, and we're like, nope, rocks are not alive. They don't meet the criteria. And he says, Well, what if they just do this too slow? And we can't measure it? What if they do this, and you know, we just don't have the capacity to see it? Like, he wasn't trying to tell us that rocks were alive. He was trying to tell us to keep those questions open. That what we, because he says science is one long chain of “we thought we knew that and we turned out to be wrong.” So maybe our criteria is wrong. And we always need to be open, you know, to thinking and questioning. And he's the only science teacher that I came across was like that. Because I think like you said, they have this idea that there's fixed knowledge. And I wonder, I wonder if some of that comes down to European thinkers emerging in a place where everybody had the same basic cosmology, right? Like, the, all three Abrahamic religions existed. And you know, in Europe, the Jews and the Muslims were not treated very well. But they had the same fundamental cosmology, the same creation story, the same flood narrative. Whereas here, we're all bumping up against each other with our trading relationships and our treaties and stuff. And we don't have the same cosmologies. You know, the Anishinaabeg and the Haudenosaunee lived, you know, very close to each other in lots of spaces. And we have some similarities, but some significant differences in terms of how we understand the world. And the Anishinaabeg and the Lakota are also kind of right up against each other. And we have significantly different cosmologies in terms of…like, there's a lot of similarities about how we see the world, but our cosmology, like our religions, you know, to use that word, are very different. And yet we learned to accept that it was not a big deal. So I kind of wonder if some of that, because now I'm reading, a pastor friend of mine, has recommended this book, shoot, what's it called? Hebrew, The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics. And she's writing all about how the Bible is full of language about the world being alive, of trees, of the personhood of creation, and a very Indigenous, like, what I would think of as a very Anishinaabeg way of thinking of, the trees are people, the stars are people, the rivers are people, that this stuff is woven through. Because she says that when we talk about it, like it's a metaphor, we're not… like, you know, “the trees clap with joy.” And we're not saying that the trees have hands, but we're saying that they're expressing joy, that when the Hebrew people came back to the land, the land was happy, that the land had the capacity to care. And that's been completely stripped, like that's not present anywhere in any Christian theology that I have heard. So that's been completely stripped from the text and this is kind of my quest right now, about how these things got stripped. Because it got stripped from the way we understand the sky so…I don't even remember where I was going with that. Kerry Goring I’m just loving it though. patty krawec They had created this kind of monolithic belief system that didn't allow for that kind of relationality whereas here on Turtle Island, or whatever we want to call it, we were constantly bumping up against other ways of thinking about things and had…we're just okay with it. Like that's just the Lakota are weird, but that's who they are. Kerry Goring It's okay to be like that, you know, that sense of acceptance, right? It's that sense of being in acceptance for all of it that I think is, is what you're bringing front and center. And just even taking in what you're saying there, Patty, I think it's quite brilliant, really interesting book, that's got to go down in the check of that one. Hilding Neilson That me too, that sounds very…very interesting. Kerry Goring That's very interesting. Um, however, what, what also comes to me when I think about that, is this sense that we have here that with that stripping, it was, it was what afforded this whole system, the colonial space that we exist in, to be even created. And this disconnection that we are experiencing with the Earth and the land, I just want my, my breath was just really heavy earlier today, because I was reading an article, I think it was in USA Today. And they were talking about, they want to move from saying climate change into using the terminology climate emergency. Because of the carbon that's in the earth, in the atmosphere, we're moving in major, major ways that is getting scary. They know that the Antarctic, the sheets, the ice sheets in the Antarctic, are going to hit the sea very soon. And it's just a really scary dynamic. And personally, I have family, you know, in St. Vincent right now, where there is a, the volcano is going off, and I'm getting live, you know, real live. You know, just talking to my people's real live experience of what that kind of space is. And so when I think about how we have existed and disconnected, the answers for me are coming from when we are doing and having conversations like this, of course, but really deep diving into this exploration of how we relate. How do we come back? How do we figure out those pieces that have been taken out and put back in? So you know, when I hear that you're doing this work, Hilding, that, to me is like, it's invaluable. How do we create this space now? Hilding Neilson Yeah, this is very interesting. Without the discussion, last semester was popped my mind is Mars. So NASA just .. this most recent mission Mars called Perseverance, you know, a little toy car going around the surface of Mars, going out of the first helicopter launch on Mars. And there are lots of robots on Mars, and maybe in 20 years, there will be people. And hopefully, those people will not be led by Elon Musk. But, you know, but it does raise a lot of questions in the meantime, which is, how alive is Mars? We don't know of anything alive on Mars within our current definition. We're pretty sure nothing comes above the surface. We haven't really explored the subsurface of Mars. There could be life. Maybe single, probably single single cell life. Life is there, probably there. And even if it isn't, do we have rights to impact that? What are the rights of Mars? I mean, you know, there's a great comic. That's the earth in a hospital bed. And another planet is a doctor saying, “Oops, you have humans?” Do we really have a right to infect Mars with more humans? Or do we have that same right to the moon? How do we do that? How do we talk about coloni-? You know? Because we do, we literally talk about Mars as colonization. Patty Krawec:Yes Hilding Neilson: We have movies of Matt Damon on Mars and we send billions of dollars rescuing rescuing a dumb white dude. Yeah, and fully full disclosure. I'm also a dumb white dude. So you know, how do we talk about Mars? From an Anishinaabeg perspective? What would an Anishinabeg, what would the Haudenosaunee, what would a Mi’kmaq or Inuit mission to Mars look like? How do we engage and interact with Mars? You know, do we? What gifts do you offer Mars? If we visit, what are we allowed to take away from Mars? And we need, really need to have that conversation because right now the conversation is basically a Western novel. And we, the word frontier gets used a lot. Or colonizing, you know, they've sort of avoided colonization for the word exploration. But it's pretty much a dog whistle when it's basically going to be Elon Musk, or another rich dude sending people there to do space mining. Because, you know, capitalism. And how we face these things, I think very much because in this play of environmental ethics, as you mentioned, how we relate, how we want to be intentionally related with Mars, because I mean, humans, if the human mission to Mars has the same kind of history as on Earth, and last century of climate change, we're probably not going to leave it, do anything good on Mars. Patty Krawec We're not going to leave better than we found it. Hilding Neilson No. And I mean, there are people who talk about dropping asteroids on Mars with the sole purpose of heating it up, blowing it up and creating an atmosphere, so that we can terraform it. I mean, that's sort of what people really dream about is terraforming Mars. And I think we can look around North America and various other parts of the world and see terraforming from, you know, when Europeans killed the bison and introduced wheat and cattle to the prairie, or how we terraform north, at different parts of the world. Doesn't quite work as well as when we look at how various Indigenous communities sort of lived in concerts, where you know, Haudenosaunee, and their farming practices, pastoral farming out east, you know, the way we treat hunts, and all these things. And so we need to have a, we definitely need to have this space open for more Indigenous, whether it's Indigenous from North America, Afro-Indigenous, Australian Indigenous, specific, everywhere in this conversation. And to be honest, if I'm going to fly on a rocket from the Earth to Mars, over 200 days, the person I probably want to ask about is someone who can actually navigate the Pacific using nothing but their hand, as opposed to say NASA who, sent Matt Damon to Mars. There's so much expertise in Indigenous communities for doing these things that we don't even think about. At least in the Western, from NASA or the Canadian Space Agency, necessarily. And so we should be having this conversation. And we should be having that we really need that space, if this is what we want to do. If not, if we not we're basically going to leave space exploration and going to the moon and basically passing NASA satellites to people like Elon Musk. And if it's not obvious, I kind of really dislike that guy. patty krawec Well, just like when we were talking about the sky Kerry Goring: How did we guess? Patty Krawec: And, you know, it's not just cluttered from light below. Thanks to Elon Musk, it's cluttered from, it's now cluttered, you know, from things he's putting up there. And, you know, it's causing problems and he doesn't care because that's not, that's not his, that's not the frame that he thinks within. Hilding Neilson If light pollution erases our stories, those satellites are rewriting them. Patty Krawec: Yes. Hilding Neilson: And why does he get to do that? Kerry Goring Love that. And I think that is so powerful. I never, like, I've had these thoughts. So hearing you speak it and really, you know, bringing that into the light, love that. I'm really relating, it resonates deeply because I agree with you. And for me, the other piece to that is this idea that we discard the earth, this idea that we have raped her, you know, The Earth has been raped and pillaged very much like, guess what, you know, every colonial story that we know. And now we're about to just move on. And so it speaks to me about this push in the way that we are human. And how we are showing up in our humanness. So I, and without the interjection, without that conversation being had, and I don't know if it's happening en mass yet, but without those conversations, we are destined to repeat it Hilding Neilson Absolutely, I mean, you know, if Amazon, Jeff Bezos , if these people are driving the conversation, you know, they're just, they're just the mercantile colonialists. There's no difference in Elon Musk and Samuel de Champlain. And the worst part about Samuel de Champlain, is he had his life saved by Indigenous people cuz he went ..  and be cured of scurvy and he just thanked God, as opposed to the, you know, people? Patty Krawec: Yeah. Hilding Neilson: And this is what we’re facing again. Yeah, we're facing this again. It’s this, the same story, just being retold on a whole new scale. And people are, conversations are starting to be had. I think there’re developments in terms of international law with things called Artemis Accords, which are related primarily to going to the moon and lunar exploration. But the biggest thing there is about preserving sites on the moon of astronomical significance or human significance. So, you know, where they planted the flag on the moon, that might be a national park, or lunar National Park. But that doesn't stop anybody from moving up there. And, you know, drawing a smiley face on the face of the moon. patty krawec And national parks… Kerry Goring What, what does that even mean? patty krawec  1:05:58 Right, because they create this idea of wilderness and nature that takes people out of it. And it preserves it, like, for what? You know, so it's just, why are we like this? Why are we like this? where to think about what kinds of humans. I just wrote an essay for Rampant Magazine, where we're like, what kind of people do we want to be? What kind of ancestors, you know? As we get thinking about, you   know, thinking about the stars, you know, looking up at the stars, and knowing that those are our ancestors and knowing that we're going to be ancestors, we're going to be star stuff, you know. So what kind of ancestors do we want to be to the worlds that come after us? Because we're, you know, worlds came before us, worlds will come after us, what kind of ancestors do we want to be? What do we want to leave? What kind of footsteps do we want to leave? And stories and possibilities? And we got to think about that stuff. As opposed to? Well, they are, they are thinking about that kind of stuff. They're just not coming to the same conclusions that we would want them to. Kerry Goring What big? How big is that? Like? What we're talking about? I'm really interested in those, in the conversations. How big is that movement? Is it? Is it growing? Like, is there an understanding that, wait a minute, we're creating the possibility of lunar parks on the moon like that, that makes me…I'm laughing, but I'm horrified all in the same breath. Are those conversations coming up in real ways, like in “Wait a minute. Hello, hello, hello,” type thoughts? Because we are hearing more about the explorations happening. And, and do we have somebody tempering it? Is that something? Hilding Neilson I don't think we really have a very strong conversation around space ethics. It's growing, largely because that's the only direction it can possibly go. It's harder to have fewer, fewer than zero people talking about it. So there's things that are starting to happen slowly in the astronomy community, but it's very limited. I think astronomy, my colleagues really kind of learned something about this from Elon Musk, when he put up the satellites and it interfered with telescopes on our, you know, because when the satellites cross upon the telescope, you just got all these streaks on your images. And they, and there were people who freaked out and accused Elon Musk of colonization, and not consulting and all this other language that we were ignoring from Native Hawaiians talking about the 30 meter telescope on Mauna Kea. And this is a project in Hawai’i to build a very big telescope on top of the mountain, where many Native Hawaiians said, “No, we're good.” And many of my colleagues were turned, kind of, were very against the Hawaiian response, using phrases like “science versus religion,” “progress versus history.” And then they used the same language as many of the Indigenous peoples were using to talk about Elon Musk. And I'm not sure they, some of them, I don't think quite got that hypocrisy. But I think a lot of people started to see that there has to be a greater discussion of voice because no matter, no matter what's happening, you know, at some point, your voice is not, might not be the one that gets heard. And then you pay the price. And so I think some of this is becoming more and more important, you know, particularly as space becomes the playground for the very, very ridiculously, uber rich. Patty Krawec Well, this has been super interesting. I’m super interested in, you know, get in, getting more into, kind of, what quantum mechanics… just because, like what you had said about the relationality of it, and how that, you know, and how that has implications for how we understand how we work within the world, and how we relate to things. So I'm really interested in kind of going, going in that direction. I don't know, man, I read this physics book. And it was super interesting. And nobody saw that coming. Kerry Goring  1:11:45 Did you watch Ant Man? Have you watched Ant Man? Patty Krawec  1:11:49 No! It’s probably one of the few MC films that I haven't watched Kerry Goring  1:11:53 Watch Ant Man. It will, it's a very, it was what? Okay, not really, but a little bit of what really sparked my interest in wanting to know more about quantum physics, was Ant Man. So that's also, maybe that's something we can all chat about too the next time you’re on. Patty Lrawec 1:12:13 Well, I’ll watch Ant Man Hilding Neilson Also, go back and rewatch End Game. All the time travel stuff is basically Sean Carroll's interpretation of quantum mechanics. patty krawec Really. Okay that I have seen, that I have seen. Okay, AW’s putting Ant Man on their watch list. Hilding Neilson It’s a good heist movie. Kerry Goring It was a great movie. It's one of my favorites for this, from that world so…thank you, Hilding! Thank you, Hilding! I appreciate you man. This was a great talk. And also please let's, let's do this again. Got my mind working. Definitely got my mind working. And I appreciate you. patty krawec Thank you so much. Hilding Neilson: Thank you! Patty Krawec: It's super interesting. Alright, bye bye Hilding Neilson: Take care. You can find more about Hilding and his work on his website (http://hildingneilson.com/) And thankyou to Nick for the transcription!! This is a public episode. 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