Aambe patty krawec

Note: When we recorded this episode the panelist Myka used a different name. While the transcript has been updated to reflect their current name the audio recording reflects that history.

Patty Krawec
This is Ambe. And we're here for our conversation about comic books and graphic novels, or kind of whatever people want to call them. I was looking up for some good quotes on it. And I came across one where some somebody had said that the difference between graphic novels and comic books are the binding.
This is part of a yearlong project of mine where we're talking about Indigenous literature's and it started with a book I read that Daniel Heath Justice had written. And as I was kind of going through the months, and kind of creating the different categories that occurred to me, this is a valid category of literature. But it doesn't often get, it doesn't often get a lot of attention, Neil pointed out that Daniel was a contributor in one of the Moonshot volumes.
We've got Jay Odjick, who actually designed my avatar. If you see me on social media, and I look like a superhero Jay is why. That was a really interesting process that I had absolutely no idea. I was just like, make me look cool. And he's like, but I need to know this. And I need to know that. I was like, wow, that's, there's just so much information. I was like, I do, I jump into things all the time with no idea of what's actually required. So it was, it was an amazing process. And I really love her.
And so we've got Neil, who is probably my most frequent flyer with this, because he's just so cool and into everything. Lee Francis, who was actually one of the very first guests on my Medicine for the Resistance podcast that I co-host with Kerry Goring. And we were talking about Indigenous futurism. And that was just such a neat conversation. And someday, I hope to get to Indigenous ComiCon because that looks really cool. And then we've got Myka Foubert who, who is my cousin, but also a really cool person. And likes, likes, comic books, graphic novels, all that, all that artistic literature stuff.
So now what I'm gonna do, I'm just gonna kind of go around and ask each of you to give a better introduction than the one that I just gave a little bit about kind of how you connect with or do this, you know, this … kind of what it is about graphic novels and comic books. that got your attention and keeps you there. So we'll start with Jay
Jay Odjick 
So yeah, kwe-kwe, Jay Odjick n’dishnikaahz. Hello, my name is Jay Odjick . I'm an Anishinaaabe artist, writer, TV producer jack of all trades, master of absolutely none. And I've been reading comics since I was old enough to be able to read.  Even though I'm from the kidney got Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg community in Quebec, which was where my dad's from I was born in Rochester, New York. And because my dad, like a lot of guys from the rest, there wasn't a lot of work in the community. So a lot of guys left to work, construction, high steel jobs like that. So I was born in Rochester. And right off the street from where we lived was a comic book shop. And we didn't have a lot of money. But luckily for me, the comic shop had this kind of dubious practice of taking the comics that didn't sell and tearing off the covers and selling them for five cents. So as a kid without a lot of money, it was pretty great because you walk in with like 25 cents, walk out with a couple of comics, roll them up, stick them in your back pocket. Nowadays was a guy who makes comics for a living and I'm like, “How could you?” But at the time, it was absolutely awesome. So that's how I kind of got into it. And I fell in love with the idea I think of using pictures to tell stories. I really wanted to be able to tell stories, and that's what brought me to it and I fell in love with the medium in that way of doing it because it seemed like something we could do without needing, you know, a ton of camera and equipment, video equipment and things like

Ambe Refusing Patriarchy
I’m re-releasing this episode for a couple of reasons, the transcript is finally finished and the anti-trans directive in Texas has made parenting a trans child reportable. People have said that it is only the medical interventions that are reportable, but that’s not how mandated reporting works. Mandated reporting does not require you to know that abuse is taking place, it only requires a good faith belief or suspicion. And having framed medical interventions for trans children as child abuse, if the child you knew as Emma is now Ethan that’s all you need.
And if you aren’t in Texas, you should consider how your state or province is watching this. How they define abuse and neglect in such malleable ways that allow for bigotry to result in reports to Child Welfare and to police. These reports, and the mandating of these reports, is violence.
In this episode you will hear from Black, White, and Indigenous people. They are queer and straight, cis and trans. They are all talking about the various ways in which they refuse patriarchy and assert space, but also about the cost of that refusal. The violence, both emotional and physical, that happens and the concerns about how they are able to show up in places where they should feel safe.
This is an important consideration for those of us who consider ourselves to be friends, allies, or accomplices. Are we willing to let them carry the entire burden of that cost just because it isn’t “our fight?” If they are our friends, it is our fight.
You're listening to Aambe: a year of Indigenous Reading


All right, so we are going to be talking about refusing the patriarchy today. Um, I started off thinking about Mother's Day, and thinking about mothers, and then thinking about, well, what does it mean to live in this world as a mother, when you don't necessarily fit that mold. Because lots of people take on mothering roles, right, without necessarily, you know, kind of being what we might think of as a conventional mother. You know, so lots of people taking on mothering roles, lots of people living outside of what we, you know, we would think of as a gender binary, you know, and so I'm, and we often talk that way about, you know, women and LGBTQ people, like we're all kind of lumped together into one group. And so then I started doing that, and I'm not sure that that's really okay, either.
Then I started thinking, Okay, well, how are we all navigating the patriarchy, we're all kind of working our way through it. And then I didn't really like that, because that sounded too much like patriarchy is legitimately in charge of everything, and it really isn't. So, then I thought, okay, we're resisting the patriarchy. And still, that sounded wrong. That sounded like, they're still this big authority. And then I remembered a conversation I had with Brianna, Urena Revelo. We've had her on the pod a couple of times. And she talks about refusal and the politics of refusal. And that's how I landed on refusing the patriarchy.
Because we are going to live our own lives, and our own terms, as mothers, as not mothers, as people who provide care in our communities. We're going to do that on our own terms, and the patriarchy can just do whatever it needs to do. So, yes, we’re smashing the patriarchy. Ernestine ended the Memoir conversation: “Decolonize and smash the patriarchy.”
So I'm gonna kind of go around and have everybody introduce themselves, and we're gonna start with Jenssa because she's, gonna leave us shortly to manage a chat room, which will probably be quiet today, because I completely forgot that this was this week. I thought it was next week. Oops. Thanks, Nick. Nick sent me a message yesterday, saying, hey, so there a link. How's this gonna work? And I'm like, holy ** that’s tomorrow. But that's okay. It will live forever on twitch and be released as a podcast. Everybody had a chance to hear our genius.
So Jenessa
Jenessa:
It's just gonna be me t

And they talk and laugh and have a great time. Back in the summer we talked about fiction and the stories we tell about our communities and ourselves. I was joined by Waubgeshig Rice, (an Anishinaabe storyteller and journalist) as well as Sonia Sulaiman (a keeper of Palestinian folktale) and Kesha Christie (an Afro-Caribbean storyteller).
There’s just too much good fiction out there and it was hard to make a list of the books that people should read because there’s just so much that is excellent. And when I started thinking about Indigeneity as a global thing, well the amount of excellent fiction just exploded and then I had a thought.
What if we talked about our stories, about recovering them and saving them and sharing them with others and so I gathered three storytellers and we shared our stories. We shared our stories of dislocation and trauma, our stories of Nakba and the Middle Passage and Residential Schools. We shared our stories of butts and babies that are little s***s and tricky spiders. We shared the stories that we saved from white anthropologists who had a single story about us. And it was magic.So please. listen and share widely. You can read the transcript here.

And join us next month at www.twitch.tv/patty_wbk when we talk about Being Indigenous.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit pattykrawec.substack.com

I encountered Richard Wagamese ba shortly after I found my father, which was in my late 20s.  My mother had moved us down south after they separated and I was raised with my maternal family, Ukranians who had come to Canada as refugees. They loved me, but I was the brown child in the white family. The fact that they loved me did not change the loss that I felt. I had no contact with my paternal family who lived, as I thought all Indians did, far away from me in the northwest.  I had no idea that there were several reserves within just a few hours of me including Anishnaabe reserves.  I thought I was all alone.  I was alone. 
The first book I read was Keeper ‘n Me in which Garnet Raven is taken from his family at 3 years old and raised in foster care.  There is one scene in which Garnet is playing cowboys and Indians with the other children and they want him to be the Indian and he becomes distraught because he doesn’t know how. 
I didn’t know how.  
Richard ba also found his family in his mid 20s, just as I did, and began that journey to find place and home and belonging that is anything but linear. It goes back and forth between connection and loss, between hope and grief, between belonging and being a tourist in your own community. The things we learned about native people were the same things that everyone else learned, all those stereotypes that are probably flooding your brain right now. The difference being that when we looked in the mirror we saw those things like tattoos. We saw them inscribed in our features, marks that wouldn’t wash off. 
His final books, Medicine Walk and Starlight, reveal a different man than his earlier works.  One who has accepted himself and his relationship with the world around him and I feel that too. I feel that knowing, not all the time .. it’s still elusive and transitory but it is there and if I quiet myself I can feel the threads that tie me here.  Whether you have read all of his books or just one, whether you know him only from the movie Indian Horse and wish you knew him better, I hope you enjoy this discussion.The panel:  
Jenessa Galenkamp  is a citizen of the Métis Nation. Originally from Tiny, Ontario by the shores of Georgian Bay, She now lives and works in St. Catharines. She spends her 9-5 working as an executive administrative assistant, and her weekends in the summer are often spent photographing weddings. When not working, Jenessa loves hiking with her partner, playing cribbage, reading, chilling with their two cats, Eleanor Rigby and Penny Lane, or working out ways for her church community to become better relatives with the broader community and learning as she goes.
Daniel Delgado is Quechua runa and Jewish. He is a writer with varied and overlapping interests in fantasy, journalism, deep ecology, and decolonization. Daniel was previously on the podcast I host, Medicine for the Resistance, where we talked about the Quechua and Jewish cosmologies and holding onto your histories while living in diaspora. One thing that stayed with me is the idea of multiple worlds and inevitable shifts in how the world is structured, these shifts are inevitable and it is our responsibility to be ready.Dalton Walker, Red Lake Anishinaabe, is an award-winning journalist based in Phoenix. He is the deputy managing editor at Indian Country Today. Before Indian Country Today, Dalton was the senior reporter at O’odham Action News in the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community in Arizona. Dalton has worked at The Gazette in Colorado Springs, Sioux Falls Argus Leader and Omaha World-Herald.
Dalton is a speaker and presenter to various local academic institutions concerning journalism and Native youth empowerment.  He served on the Native American Journalists Association board of directors from 2013-2016. Follow him on Twitter @daltonwalker 
Raven Sinclair is a member of Gordon First Nation of the Treaty #4 area of southern Saskatchewan. Raven has been with

Refusing Patriarchy.  The theme for this month went through several iterations, originally I was thinking about Mother’s Day and the various ways that we mother that go far beyond a binary that is so comforting to some and so alienating for others.  Then I thought about the way that norms become so pervasive that we become defined by them, on one side are men and on the other women, 2SLGBTQIAA, and non binary people.  So I thought about Navigating Patriarchy.  But no, that wasn’t right.  I landed on Resisting Patriarchy, because that’s closer to what we do, we push back against it.  
And then my brain latched onto Refusing Patriarchy. And that’s where it stayed because more than navigating or resisting, a politics of refusal simply refuses to engage. A politics of refusal turns it’s back on patriarchy and just goes on building something new, something different, something closer to what we had before.  A politics of refusal does not seek inclusion because if what are we seeking inclusion into?  The people on this panel have all refused: refused to let Patriarchy define the boundaries or decide when we have transgressed them. Refused to be defined and in that way have defined refusal.  
For racially marginalized people patriarchy is not always the final boss that needs to be dismantled, our men don’t benefit from it the same way that cis white men do, they don’t even benefit from it the same way that cis white women do.  And Homonormativity means that queer white men often benefit from patriarchy as well.  
Refusing Patriarchy.  
The panel:  
Robyn Bourgeois (Laughing Otter Caring Woman, she/her) is a mixed-race Cree woman born and raised in Syilx and Splats’in territories of British Columbia, and connected through marriage and her three children to the Six Nations of the Grand River. She is an associate professor in the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies at Brock, where her scholarly work focuses on indigenous feminisms, violence against indigenous women and girls, and indigenous women’s political activism and leadership. In addition to being an academic, Robyn is also as activist, author, and artist.
Angela J. Gray (she/her) is an emerging writer and visual artist who has shared her writing and poetry on Vancouver Co-op Radio’s Storytelling Show. Angela has trained as a photographer and enjoys using photography and acrylic painting as means to enhance her writing endeavours. Her training as a community addictions counsellor is a valuable resource to her creative work.Nick (they/them) is a white Jewish settler living on Coahuiltecan, Karankawa, and Sana land in Houston, TX. They are a queer transgender abortion storyteller, and they focus on improving abortion care and support for queer and trans people and providing practical support for people seeking abortions in the Houston area. They are married and have two cats, and they spend a lot of their free time knitting and cross stitching.Seán Carson Kinsella is migizi dodem (Bald Eagle Clan) and also identifies as twospirit/queer/crip/aayahkwêw and is descended from signatories of Treaties 4, 6 and 8 (êkâ ê-akimiht nêhiyaw/otipemisiwak/Nakawé/Irish). They were born in Toronto, on Treaty 13 lands and grew up in Williams Treaty territory. A member of the Titiesg Wîcinímintôwak Bluejays Dancing Together Collective, Seán has been featured as a reader at both last year’s and this year’s Naked Heart festival. Their zine pîkiskiwewin sâkihtowin featuring poems of Indiqueer futurism, survival and getting hot and bothered was released last year. They are currently the Director, the Eighth Fire at Centennial College and have previously taught Indigenous Studies there as well.  
Taté Walker is a Lakota citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of South Dakota. They are a Two Spirit feminist, Indigenous rights activist, and a published and award-winning storyteller for outlets like “The Nation,” “Everyday Feminism,

Somehow the last 20 minutes got truncated in the podcast release. You can watch and listen to the entire episode on Twitch.
transcript follows the show notes.
What are the conditions our communities need to see the Milky Way?  
This is the question that Chanda Prescod-Weinstein poses near the end of her book The Disordered Cosmos.  I hadn’t meant to include a book on astro/physics when I created April’s topics, and indeed when I first thought of April I thought only about Braiding Sweetgrass. But I follow Chanda on Twitter and she’s been on the podcast and when I saw that she had written a book it occurred to me that we don’t look up often enough, so I asked her if she thought it would be appropriate and she thought that it would be. I hadn’t read the book at that point yet, it wasn’t published until early March, but we really don’t look up often enough.  
When Chanda was on the podcast I had made a cheeky comment about Thoreau sitting in the woods thinking his Big Thoughts while his mother brought him sandwiches. It’s a common remark, intended to remind people of Thoreau’s privilege and the nonsense of Enlightenment ideas about pristine wilderness. Chanda turned this over and reminded me that the people who make her meals, who empty her garbage can, who sweep the floors and do all the myriad caretaking that exists in the world are also part of the scientific process.  Enlightenment ideas about wilderness are nonsense, but not because Thoreau didn’t make his own sandwiches.
So what are the conditions that our communities need to see the Milky Way?
To notice badgers and raccoons?
To gather moss?
To watch the growth of plants and their relationships to each other?
To be undrowned.  
Each of this books talks about how our relationships with the world around us are made complicated and disconnected.  Animals are an inconvenience. Food comes in packages. Weeds get pulled. Pets are much loved but still commodities, animals we buy and sell and who themselves live in disconnection.  We learn to listen to the world around us on its own terms, not just to draw lessons from them. They are teachers, but we need to be careful about the way we think about that because they don’t exist in order to teach us. Teaching is part of reciprocal relationship, it is not transactional and as Chanda notes in quantum physics, the act of observing has consequences, it changes the thing being observed. 
So when we think of the conditions that we need in order to see, to know, to gather, to watch, to be undrowned we think about all the barriers that exist. The lights that drown out the stars and the distance that you need to drive, if you even have access to a car, to be somewhere that you can see. The way that we live in cities, not the fact of cities but the way that we have constructed them to pull resources from places we call remote and then concentrate them to meet certain needs, depriving those places of the resources that they need.  
We think about our location, because our location and the way that we think about it is what complicates these things.  And thinking about our location helps us to work through what we might do differently.  How we might imagine, and then enact, a world where Black children can see the night sky and dream big dreams that come true.  
If you haven’t had time to read the books, that’s ok. Please join us anyway. I have resources for you:
* This conversation with Daniel about his book Raccoon that comes out in June.
* This conversation with Mi’kmaq astronomer Hilding Neilson about Indigenous stargazing.
* This magical interview with Mari Joerstad about the ways in which the Hebrew Bible describes a world that is filled alive with other than human persons.
* And this article about the first three months of conversations.
This month’s panel:
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an American and Barbadian theoretical cosmologist, and is both an Assistant Professor of Physics and Astr