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):

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 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):

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):  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):

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):

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 coloniz