Medicine for the Resistance patty krawec

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):
You're listening to medicine for the resistance
Patty (00:00:04):
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):
Couldn't be more perfect. 
Joy! Oh yeah. 
Patty (00:00:24): 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):
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):
Exciting to be back and, uh, and to meet, to meet Joy online, at least.
Joy (00:03:00):
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):
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):
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 ou

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, 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 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 and her work on post humanism, and sort of rejecting how that's been framed by white scholars. Tha

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 

Angela:
You I have I've had troubles with the word microaggression, I've had troubles with it for quite some time. We hear, I think I've been hearing it more and more over the last few years in particular, the last year, I've been hearing it a lot more in the workplace. And because people are trying to be woke or aware, but the reality of living it, it's not micro,
Patty:
right. it's not meaningless.


Angela:
And so when we, for me, when we talk about it as a micro thing, the parallel is that when somebody is behaving that way, it becomes a dialogue or a narrative of that person's too sensitive, or I didn't mean anything by it. So I don't know what the big deal about it is, or, well, you know, she's just bringing it up, because she's hurt. And it's not, it's not about being hurt, it's about every instance of those things that have transpired over your life for a long period of time, continuing to open a wound of a larger viewpoint that you don't belong, or there's something not quite right with you, or those, we have to contain you, as opposed to the larger picture that you're not wanted to hear. And, or you're not wanted to be a participant in that society, or that structure in within the society.
And so, for me, when I've been looking at this end, a lot of my writing over the last year has been about microaggressions, because of experiencing it, and while, you know, a lot lot different areas of my life. I go back to the beginning point of erasure. So, the eraser of, of my identity. So you know, being born, being taken from my Black mother, my birthday being changed, my name being changed, and my Black mother not being allowed to take me back to Jamaica, or make arrangements for me to go to Jamaica, because realizing that it's, she's going to lose me, right?
So, and then that whole erasure are going to a small community where there's no people of color. And so I think one of the biggest macro regressions you can do to transracial adoptee, is to put them in a white family and not have any mentors. And, and so in that, you know, that whole, it becomes a series of events from from earlier in your childhood, basically, from your birth, to try to unpack, and try to find a place within living in a social structure that doesn't include you. And so how do we find that?
So, you know, my writing is about that, but it's also that place of moving from that place to a place of where do you find your place within all of that, so that you can actually have good mental health? Is that possible? You know, and what is the generational impact of that?
When I watched my, my son growing up, and facing these horrible aggressions, as a Black Indigenous child, young man, he's not a child. He's a young man.
And I was, you know, I was gonna, with all that, you know, been paying attention to and relistening to interviews from in particular Robin Maynard and Desmond Cole, and defund the police. I’ve been listening to a lot of that lately. And I was framing an essay around around the police involvement in my life, and what and the transition of that from being a young young girl in kindergarten to late teens, early 20s. And that, and that experience, and so I never really thought much about it. But I've thought more and more about it by watching my son get stopped by the police. Recently, you know, in, in his teenage years, he shared with me recently that the reason he decided to go bald, from the time he was like 14 to 20 was because he found that he got stopped less by the police. So, I thought, yeah, and it didn't help. He still got stopped a lot. As he's got a look that people quite don't know. You know what he is right? Which is really a horrible thing to say. But that's,
Patty: 
I don't know, they don't know where he belongs,  do you belong in this neighborhood? Or do you work in this neighborhood? What do you look like, you know, do you look like the people who live here? Do you look like the people who work here? You know, do you look li

Black and Indigenous Solidarities
With Robert Warrior



Patty: 
So we're here with Robert Warrior. And so funny story, Kerry, I'm reading this book Crossing Waters Crossing Worlds by Tiya Miles. It was for Aambe book club, History a couple of months ago back in February, and I can't and, as happens a lot of times, you know, when I'm reading books or essays, I always think “is that person on Twitter, I got to find them,” you know. And so I'm going along, and I see Oh, Robert Warrior, and I'm really enjoying this essay. And so I log on to Twitter with the intention of seeing if I can find Robert Warrior. And in my notifications is like, Robert Warrior just followed you. *laughter* No way, I was just about to look for you. So that's Yeah. So there's a nice, nice, nice little bit of synergy there. I don't know what I might have been going off on on Twitter that got your attention, but
Robert:
I think it was on I mean, I think it was on Afro Indigenous issues or something like that.. That's a bit identity in general, I can't remember.
Patty: 
But that was something that, I mean, really, thanks. You know, this is this is why relationships are important, right? You know, because it's relationship that I have with Kerry, and then, you know, and other, you know, and other people that I'm getting to know, you know, just really how important these conversations are between our communities, and recognizing that our communities are not discrete categories, either.
Robert:
Great points,
Patty:
Not only are people in the Black diaspora Indigenous in their own right, in other ways. But people who are Indigenous to here also had relationships with Black people.
Robert:
Exactly, sure
Patty:
Also, you know, so we're, we're relatives in all kinds of ways. And, and, you know, one of the points that Tiya made when we talked with, you know, when, when she was on, Aambe, on the book club, was how there's gaps in gaps in our stories, and the story in our own stories. I mean, we all about what passes for mainstream education and the gaps that exist there, and how we're just not present. I just went off on a Twitter thread about Grapes of Wrath. And, you know, and how Steinbeck almost gets it, so close to understanding connection to land, you know, but where are the Indigenous people? On whose land, they're living? Oh, we're dead, like the snakes.
Robert:
Wow. Right.
Patty:
You know, so I go off on that relationship to land because like, we know that we're not in white literature in white education, but we're also missing from each other's stories. That was the point that Tiya made was, you know, in Black Studies, there's gaps where Native people should be. And then Native studies, there's gaps where Black people should be.
Robert:
Right, right. Well, I mean, I think that's a terrific point. And I think that I mean, so much this this conversation in general this topic I think, requires a lot of a lot of grace on the part of the people who are having the conversation, a lot of compassion for why people don't know the things they don't know. And and that people can only start where they start from and and we're trying to make the conversation better, we're not trying to have a perfect conversation right off the bat.
And so it but they can be really difficult and Tiya is such a genius and such a wonderful person, such an amazing scholar, but also just an amazing writer. And how she has she's able to, to in her first book and Ties That Bind, tell the story of this one little family and illustrate through through Shoe Boots and Lucy, that story that is just so powerful. You know, it's not very often that I cry in in when I'm reading a book but you know, When, when, when Lucy at the end of it is freed. Finally, when she's a very old woman, you know, I just, I just cried because I just it just the weight of her of her servitude had weighed on me through the whole thing, you know, and the way that she had to persevere through all of that. And then to

Please note this episode deals with sexuality and sexual violence and may not be suitable for all listeners. Some material may be triggering.
If you do find yourself triggered or having difficulty, please contact your local rape crisis center. If you need assistance locating support, please use RAINN.org in the US and Ending Violence in Canada to locate supportive services.


Kerry: 
We're talking about Tamari’s book, Appealing Because He is Appalling. And it's all about the idea of Black masculinity, colonialism, and erotic racism. And this is a topic that is so near and dear to my heart. Because it's very much about how we perceive ourselves sexually, and how these ties really affect how we are showing up in these colonial spaces. How has the systematic racism, colonialism, you know, all the isms affected us, and in particular, a very forgotten piece of this space, which is the Black man. Black men have been railroaded into one real vice where, where there, I've always looked at it like we we see them, you know, in this sinister space as one product, or we see them as an infallible space and another end of that product. Like it's almost nonexistent. There's no space in between. And Tamari, I really want us to get a moment to, to unpack all of it, because there is a lot here and so much stuff that I had no idea about. And I'm sure we'll we'll get to talking. I'm sure we will. Let's get dive in.
Tamari:
Yes.  No, thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity to be with you. And Patti again. Is this our second conversation? I think it's our second?
Patty: 
Yeah, at least second, maybe third.  We’re old friends now.
Tamari:
Yeah. We often do not speak about Black men and disabilities, you know, to talk about police violence, without talking about the disabling of Black men, either psychologically or physically. We're just missing a huge part of that conversation. But not just the the disabilities that arises from being incarcerated or interaction with the police. But the brilliant thing about the paper that Leroy and I wrote, and I wrote is that we take this back to slavery. And slavery was the production of disabilities. And if you look at the nature of resistance and rebellions, from slavery onward, very often you're talking about individuals that were disabled.
So if you go to Haiti, you found that Boukman and others who were the founding figures of the Haitian Revolution, those people were all physically disabled, they had either limbs that were dismembered, or some other such thing. Harriet Tubman, right, she took a piece of metal to the head and had convulsions, all her life. So disabilities is a major part of Black resistance and rebellion.
And if you know, I mean, I think we can get get to this, again, is to talk about Emmett Till, and disabilities. That is a really important piece of disabilities history that not a lot of people know. And Leroy introduced me to it. And I did a bit of research on that. And it's just absolutely amazing that this young boy had a speech impediment. So he had like a speaking disability and his mother in Chicago taught him in order to form his words, he should whistle. So that led to, uh, I forget the name of the guy that led the charge. I think his last name was Bryant in thinking that this little boy was whistling at his wife and his wife knew that that was not the case. And upon her deathbed admitted that it was all concocted. So disabilities is a major part of resistance. But it's also produced by anti-Blackness and the particular targeting of Black men.
So about me. So I'm a professor of sociology at Brock University. been there since 2006. And my areas of specialization and interest are Blackness and anti-Blackness in Western and Asiatic cultures. I do not separate the west from the east because it's all Asia people talk about the European continent. All the continents begin with “A” except for North and South America which are joined by an isthmus.
Patty: 
Yea