Rehearsals for living w/ Robyn Maynard & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

[MUSIC] [MUSIC] So I'm joined today by the wonderful Robin Maynard and Leanne Betis-Samosage Simpson. I think I said that wrong, I really apologize. But we're talking about their new book, which is an epistolary. Epistolary, I learned that word while reading this book. And it's called "Rehorsals for Living." I believe it actually just published this week as we're recording. But I had the pleasure of reading this in the manuscript form before it became a book. And it was a very kind of moving thing for me. But I just wanted to turn it over to you to maybe introduce yourselves to our listeners, who you are and where you're calling from. So I guess we can start with Robin. Sure. Thanks so much for having us on the show. I'm a big fan of the Red Nation podcast. So I'm really happy to be here. I am a black feminist scholar, scholar activist based in Toronto. I'm actually as of tomorrow an assistant professor of black feminism in Canada at the University of Toronto Scarborough in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies. But I'm someone who comes into writing and thinking from a long standing engagement in movement work, in movements against policing and engagements with black liberation, struggle, in my right justice struggle. And I've been producing all kinds of writing, interviews and interventions, I think over the last few decades related to this kind of work. I'm E. Kenuaya. My name is Leanne Bidassamuse Simpson. I'm a Michi Sagi Knitzenabek. I'm a band member of Elderville First Nation. And I'm a writer and a musician and a thinker and an organizer. And I work with the Dichntas Center for Research and Learning in the end day. Yeah, and thanks again for joining us today. I'll just tell a little bit of a story about my relationship to this book. I read it last summer when I was on my way to Brazil, actually meeting with an Indigenous organization through the Progressive International, which I'm a member. But we were on a delegation to meet with a PB, which is this national Brazilian Indigenous organization that was organizing this massive occupation of Brasília, which is the capital of Brazil. And so I was reading this book while also attending these events and being on this trip. And one thing that was really interesting about Brazil was the integration of like Afro-Indigenous traditions. So for example, when we were in Brasilia, when they had this encampment, it was called the movement for life. And they were singing. And of course, they were singing in Portuguese, they were singing in their Indigenous languages. But one of the hosts who was kind of our interpreter and translator, she was telling me she said, yeah, they're singing about their deities, they're singing about Christian deities, such as the archangel, Archangel Michael. But they're also singing about Nigerian deities that have come from Africa. And so there was kind of this syncretism within the Indigenous tradition that was like taking from all these various things and talking about their kind of spiritual resistance as integrating both African roots through the Columbus, which were the Maroon colonies that integrated with a lot of the Indigenous communities. And acknowledging, for example, like the Amazon itself, while the kind of image of the land defender is often indigenous, they often pointed out to us, they said, well, in the Amazon, 60% of the population is actually African, you know, Afro-Brazilian, and they are the land defenders as well. And so I was just thinking about, while I was reading this manuscript, like how, first of all, in the North, North America, as from our various subject positions, when we write, we're often taught to write kind of in silos and I think vertically towards kind of whiteness, I guess, and how we articulate our struggles. And one of the things that I appreciated about this book, and I would like you to maybe talk a little bit more about that and how you conceived this epistolary, this letter writing between, you know, as kind of a horizontal practice and a practice of what you both call, you know, communion. So, I guess the first question stemming from that is, you know, what was the impetus to write this? And it begins in, you know, letter form, it begins with Robin writing to Lian, but, you know, there's less of a speaking to, I guess, this kind of broader white audience, and I see it more as speaking between two movements. So, I'm happy to speak to some of that. I think that, I mean, first of all, I think what's important to, for me to always remember the more, because it's always easy for me to retrospectically, retro, retroactively, I think, think about all of the different historical traditions and intellectual traditions that would have led me to reach out to Lian, but, you know, when we originally started this project, it wasn't intended to be a book necessarily, and I think that's something that really helped shape it as what, you know, what we did describe as a communion as a way of reaching out within and across movements to an intellectual and a thinker and a friend that I very much respected, which is Lian, and trying to find a way that we could think together through the different traditions of struggle that were both embedded in, come from, and beholden to, to think about what freedom could mean in a context where we know that black communities, indigenous communities are really on the forefront of the global climate catastrophe, or on the forefront of the crisis of policing, of prisons, you know, after we'd begun writing, of course, the pandemic emerged and ended up again being some of the most vulnerable and expendable people in the pandemic. So really thinking about how the different traditions of resistance, of refusal, and of world building that we come from can help us to envision something else, really understanding that there's no turning to whiteness when the world that whiteness built, the world that white supremacy and racial capitalism built is really premised on foreclosing or realities, on foreclosing our futures. So I think it was a way of reaching out as an active friendship, but also as an act really of co-thinking. And for me, I think that while academia often does try to discipline us into different ways of, you know, each community appealing to whiteness, what I see really differently on the ground in movement is something that's so different than that. So some of the work that I had been doing against policing in the earlier years of my life had been specifically around black community and black community, mean impact, by police profiling and police violence, but one of the most sort of meaningful engagements that I had in my life was starting to work and organize with Bridget Toli, an indigenous woman from Manawaki, whose mother had been killed by the police in Quebec, and they had actually investigated the death of her mother by, you know, it was the brother of the officer. So that level sort of of just pure impunity in policing and thinking in that how in so many, whether it comes to the ways that we're being slaughtered or the way that we have to fight against policing, that these are struggles that are intertwined on the ground, that it's black families, that it's indigenous families, especially that are experiencing some of the so many of the world ending violence is that we experience. So I think that there's a kind of organic history and one that stretches back well before this as well, you know, black feminists in the Toronto Black women's collective in Toronto in the 1980s were already writing and thinking and solidarity with indigenous feminists that this is something our communities have actually been doing for many generations and of course, going back way before the 1980s as well. Yeah, so I got this amazing letter from from Robin Maynard and and folks can read that that first letter in rehearsals for living and it was a gift and it was an invitation and it was a gathering of worlds and I think an invitation to think alongside Robin and the movements that Robin organizes with and so it took me a bit to to write back because of the substantive nature of the letter I had to I had to read some things that the letter was full of footnotes and ideas and concepts and so it took me a while to be able to I think write a letter back that that was the same caliber as this letter and I've been thinking about I've been thinking about indigenous internationalism for a while because I think for me and my trajectory and indigenous studies I spend a lot of time thinking about Enishinaabe things for a long time and it's only recently that I've think those teachings around deep relationality, not just within my homeland, but connecting on a planetary scale through time and space have really sunk in. And I really recognized that in the face of racial capitalism, I can't just organize, I can't just think locally, I have to think globally, I have to educate myself continuously and align myself with the anti-colonial movements of the world that are building new worlds. And that became something that was really generative for me and really exciting. And so I also was coming sort of out of I don't know more, where I think we saw the movement collapse in on itself because in part, we hadn't done the work, the old school work of organizing and building relationships and maintaining relationships of trust. So it was fairly easy for the state to sort of intervene and divide and conquer. And another sort of issue that I was thinking about coming out of I don't know more was that catering to whiteness in terms of tactics, in terms of messaging, in terms of the way that we were organizing and having this constant discussion about what white liberals were going to think and how we were going to get them on side and not being attentive to the movements that we were sharing time and space with. And I think that that was to the detriment of the movement particularly when you enter into the space of backlash. And so I was wanting to deliberately put time and energy into building a relationship with Robin and a friendship with Robin. And again, those letters were very, I think they were they were personal and they were a personal education project for us. They weren't rewrote all of these letters with without the intent of ever of ever sharing them worth anyone ever reading them other than the two of us. And I think actually that's a really beautiful part of this because the audience for for my letters was Robin and the audience for her letters was was was me. And I think that kind of developed a different kind of book. Yeah, I want to talk a little bit more about Canadian liberalism and how you both confront that within not only this this book itself but also in your work because Canada, you know, why there tends to be an outright kind of reaction, you know, right wing reaction and kind of attack on things such as like critical race theory here in the States. Canada operates in a little bit of a different way in terms of its representational politics. And I think, you know, looking at this moment in time, it just fascinates me that we go from, you know, a time period of like 2016 when woke was used as a word to describe, you know, the kind of politics that were emerging on the streets specifically amongst, you know, black communities and organizers within, you know, the Black Lives Matter movement. But, you know, come 2022, the word work woke is like a derogatory word and it's used to describe what essentially is liberalism. And I, you know, I kind of want to ask both of you like, how did we get to this point? Because you're writing in a time period in 2020 when there there seemed to be, you know, it was a moment of terrible danger while also a kind of moment of possibility that things could be different. Yeah, I think that what you're pointing out specifically about Canada is so important in terms of I think that while Canada, much like the United States, much like other countries across the West, in fact, the Global South, you know, we see the grossly disproportionate police killings of Black and Indigenous people, you know, the extremely high levels of incarceration of having our kids ripped out of families from child welfare with the family policing system. But nonetheless, there's something that's peculiar about Canada and I think it's about having a kind of aversion to the spectacular. You know, of course we have these horrific incidents like Abdidhaman Abdi who's a Somali black man who was beaten to death by the Ottawa police, but as much as Canada is still built upon structural racism, I think that there is a way that it likes to move toward a sort of liberalism that keeps its atrocities tidily out of sight. Right? So this is something that's really particular to a certain kind of Canadian narrative of how racial violence is perpetuated behind this veneer of benevolence. So, you know, in capitalism and slavery, Eric Williams says something to the effect of the streets of London are paved with the butt of the blood of slaves. Right? That there's this history, this well-known history, a Britain's involvement in the slave trade, I think. All of us, including those of us educated in Canada very much know the very violent history of enslavement in the United States and that's very much not the case in a visible, in the visible realm here, but you could say the same thing about the streets of a city being paved with the blood of slaves in New York. You could say the same thing about Toronto and, you know, in a country like Canada that likes to keep things tidily out of sight, I think it's so important to think about the role that Canada plays not only on inflicting racial violence against people who live here, black and indigenous and racialized people living here, but the blood of black and indigenous kinfokes globally. So, Canada is, you know, a place of really important role in the carbon unloading and the massive ecological and human devastation because of extractive industries being home to well over 50% of, you know, of mining companies that are based in the world. So, if we look through the massive destruction of indigenous and African peoples and the Niger Delta Reden, you know, across Brazil and as you mentioned in the Amazon, so many of those violence can be traced back to here. So, even as Canada is able to represent itself as a very multicultural haven, that's very much by, at many times, externalizing the brute violence that actually the country is based upon. So, it becomes really easy to embrace these kinds of symbolic moments of the prime minister of, you know, black chiefs of police taking the knee. Supposedly, of course, you know, acknowledging the harms of anti-black racism and making a break from the past well, of course, only continuing to enact this global violence against people and also, you know, maintaining and expanding the powers of police, the powers of incarceration at the same time. So, you have a place in which, you know, apology and contrition becomes central, but at the same time, that's only because racial violence is ongoing and continuous and always push to the sidelines of what this country imagines itself to do. I think that was what really drew me to Robin was her book, "Policing Black Lives," because it destroys Canadian exceptionalism in terms of transatlantic slavery and anti-blackness. So many Canadians loved to position themselves as being this great place in comparison to the US. Like when Trump was elected, come move to Canada. Canada is built on the same white supremacy and the same genocide and the same dispossession as the US. And all of those same forces are still here, sometimes bubbling under the surface and sometimes just outright killing us. I think that the liberalism is so difficult in an indigenous organizing context because you have this Prime Minister who has got the signalling, often virtually signalling, but signalling that he is our friend and he is kind and he cares and he understands indigenous issues. He has the tattoo, he's smudging, he's flanked with power dancers and at the same time is making no changes structurally in terms of land in terms of social conditions, in terms of the issues that are important to indigenous peoples. And I think that liberalism is a trick and it's dangerous because it gets indigenous organizing and it gets indigenous movements. So we get organized on the streets around residential school. Liberalism gives us a state controlled national inquiry. We get organized around missing and murdered indigenous women girls to spare people. We get another inquiry. We get upset about all of the dead kids that we're finding in the graveyard of residential schools. We get an apology and so all of these kinds of positioning are used to placate us and to get those movements. And so I think that we have to be smarter than that and I think that we have to be more strategic than that and I think that we have to organize before that during that, after that, through that. This book really kind of takes place during the George Floyd uprisings that really became an international movement. But also I think what's forgotten and you both write about this is at the beginning of 2020, I remember this distinctly, feeling a lot of optimism especially around the uprisings that were happening in solidarity with what Soodan and the hashtag #Reconcils is dead and the shutting down of rail lines and kind of really on the precipice of something that could have been much greater but then being completely derailed by this crisis on one hand, it was a pandemic and it was a plague and I think there's a book called On Nicarocapitalism that really talks about this notion of a plague and being a crisis for capitalism to restructure itself but also colonialism to kind of retrench its authority over certain lands and the repression of certain movements but also in the midst of this and the midst of this kind of so-called shutdown or whatever, you have this historic uprising emanating from here in Dakota homelands with the the murder, the police murder of George Floyd and it's not to say that one is more important or less spectacular or whatever than the other but I think that the what's so in in struggle like really gets overshadowed and what I really appreciate about the conversation that you two are having is you really slow time down and to really kind of process things not only as they're happening but within this kind of longer historical framework and so with that in mind my next question is really thinking about how you know this these letters emerged and how the two of you were using you know as a method as a method as abolitionist practice the idea of communion communion with each other in terms of you know because it's as much as what would you call it a chronicle of what was happening in 2020 as it is an analysis a deep analysis and an intimate analysis of how it's affecting both of your personal lives because you you both are you know parents you're you're talking about the kind of various and you know multi-scale your intimacies that you have with your children your family your communities but also this larger you know movement whether it's indigenous or black and how this you know how you like how this letter writing you know really spoke to the the kinds of things that you know you were going through because as I was reading it I was having kind of flashbacks of like what was happening at that time you know I saw somebody get shot four times in the back by a white supremacist you know like that image is like seared into my mind and whenever when somebody talks about tearing down a statue as you do you know talking about the Ryerson statue that just comes into my mind because it happened in the context of of albuquerque and the taking down of colonial statues but I was wondering if you could maybe speak to how you know you both were moving through you know that kind of that kind of feeling and if there is a tendency you know returning to these letters if it if it evokes certain things or is a reminder of what you know of what terror but also possibility a lot of people were feeling and going through at that time yeah for me it's so interesting because having started the letters before the pandemic emerged and of course a letter could have turned into many things we are thinking about so many different kinds of collaboration that would have been possible including doing more you know land-based visits together in different areas and all kinds of other all kinds of other ways of communing that seemed on the table but of course as the pandemic happened and shuttered the day-to-day then land letter writing actually became such an important sort of solace from what was happening and a way of actually processing I think first the massive disruption of day-to-day life that happened you know with the state home orders and everything that happened but also you know as erupted as you'd mentioned some of the most historic protest movements of our time you know that began as you'd said with woodsoatin and then were shuttered but with this historic protest in defense of black life you know in Toronto there was a protest of over 10,000 after the police killed an Afro-Indigenous woman or after an Afro-Indigenous woman registered to give a get-died at in in the context of a police encounter and this only you know this only just snowballed into massive protests all around the country as we saw more killings of black and Indigenous people so as a way of you know at the same time organizing against what was happening and trying to lay out what defunding could and could and should look like in Canada writing to Leanne at this time I think was something that really helped me pause and you know look at the moment of acute racial violence that we were facing but also this enormous moment of protest of refusal and resistance and to actually put that into a historical context to actually take me out of the present moment and to force me to think about the long traditions of Indigenous and black resistance that have gotten us to there and that we're actually making so many of the demands that we saw on the streets and community centers towards defunding dismantling abolishing police and prisons possible to think about the mentors who had gotten us there and the movements who had made any of that thinking possible so as the as the pandemic went on and as this you know as these protests and this just this massive world historic event was happening around us these letters became a kind of place that I felt that I really lived with with Leanne in this place that we were actually in the context of trying to think about what it meant to build the world for black communities for Indigenous communities for you know human and non-human inhabitants of this planet in a moment of great danger and crisis that we were also finding just this small space to actually build a world between us to build a home space between us at the same time as we were trying to envision that more broadly so I think that particularly at a time where you know my my son's school was closed for for for four months he was home with me so for me to be thinking about what it means to be trying to get our comrades out of detention out of carceral sites well literally at the same time you know I'm talking to my son and parenting my son right in a letter in this context that allowed me to think about both about what it means to raise a young black kid to know that it's his responsibility to get people free is something that is absolutely and totally in concert with the project of what it's going to mean for our communities collectively and expansively to get through so to be able to weave in the personal you know the very granular moments of the day-to-day with a sort of analysis of what's happening more broadly in the world around us and the historic movements of slavery obligation of decolonization globally of ongoing anti-colonial struggle here those were all able to sort of find their way into something that I think with any other format would have been far too ambitious to actually try to take on. One of the things I was thinking of Nick when you were talking and when Robin when you were talking is just as academics um you have this privilege of time and so you have time to think through clearly and read and allow the passage of time to see how things kind of shake down and I think that folks living on the front lines and organizing on the front lines don't have that privilege and so organizers have to think and analyze in real time before the crisis is over and I think that that element in these letters was really generative for for me and for the work because it's a level of vulnerability. I remember thinking there's this extraordinary mobilization for Black life, a global uprising for Black life through that first summer at the same time there's this pandemic at the same time there's this shuttering of the Wyssoitzen mobilizations and trying to navigate that through these letters without knowing how things are going to turn out, without knowing how sort of other other folks are thinking through these things there's a level of vulnerability but I also think that level of vulnerability is so important in terms of the people that are in the streets making anti-colonial protests and organizations happen so I think that that ended up being a really interesting part of of the book but also a very a very difficult part of the book because so much was happening that we were both emotionally invested in and it was difficult to figure out whether the book would have any meaning outside of that temporal time period. So it's interesting to see how the systems I think that we were critiquing in the in the beginning of the book only became stronger and more embedded through through crisis any moments of our potentialities were we're fleeting and it made me realize that racial capitalism is not going to go out without a tremendous horrific ongoing fight and it made me realize that we are we've been born into struggle and any idea that that I thought that this was going to be easy or that this was going to be imputed with hope is not the reality and it's not even the reality that my ancestors lived through. This is this is struggle and this is difficult and it's our responsibility to to organize through it and to dream dream alternatives. The only thing I wanted to add to that is just I actually feel so grateful that we wrote the letters in a very timely way because I think it would be so tempting to go back and rewrite with the kind of knowledge that we have now around the extreme strengthening of the criminal justice system. The massive, you know, you call it the refunding, but the police were never defunded the tightening of the carceral system over our top of every, over every demand that was made and widely supported. And I think that I'm really glad I wasn't that we were writing in this time that we weren't because it was a letter format that you wouldn't go back and change with the knowledge that you have or write these addendums. So I actually feel so grateful that now I can find for my own self this document of what it felt like to be alive in a moment when statues of slavers were being thrown into the sea when police stations were on fire. When, you know, we were talking about police abolition on national television. I remember being on national TV somehow in this, you know, what I never would have imagined this moment where I was pointing to the person that was hosting the show about where else Toronto police budget could go, you know, in the city. What that could actually mean for city residents. And I think that it's also a reminder for me now not to dismiss how powerful what had actually happened at that moment was that that awakening that was seen across society, the mass support for things like defunding the police, the idea that we could actually build police free futures, prison free futures, border free futures. You know, that doesn't just disappear even if the news stories have moved on, even if political leaders have remained and increased their corruption. What actually happened in terms of human beings, in terms of people, the people who came out from days and months at that time that people who rose up in carceral sites, that the idea that we could be free, that we needed to transform, radically transform the world that we lived in, that that's something that didn't go away even if we're made perhaps not feeling that that emotion in that sense of possibility given what we're seeing in the news today, given the absolutely horrific ongoing turns of events politically coming from the United States, coming from Brazil and more broadly. Actually, you know, I had a question about land, but I mean, just to speak to that point, Robin, we're living in a moment of intense backlash from 2020. I mean, there's, like going back to the how woke was something that was affirmative because I remember there was even a documentary that was about standing rock that was called awake and it was putting it into the context of like this broader social political moment in 2016, how you had the rise of authoritarianism in like a distinct form of fascism, you know, with Donald Trump. And you had also one of the most historic like resistance movements in 2016 at the tail end of the Obama presidency, kind of really bringing us into this, you know, into Donald Trump's, you know, presidency. But now, you know, with the 2020 uprisings, you know, woke is a derogatory term. You have backlash against defund the police. You have a backlash against just basic things like DIEES, the diversity, inclusion, equity, you know, departments. And while there's like, there's room to criticize those things is basically, you know, damage control or mitigation or counterinsurgency, what have you through representational politics. There's also something to say about how mainstream that backlash has become. You have, you know, sure, you had January 6 in the United States with the attempt, you know, the auto coup or the self coup, you know, I don't know how you coup colonialism when you just try to reestablish colonialism in a different form. But then you have like the people's party movement in Canada in reaction to, you know, Justin Trudeau and the liberal, you know, and the liberal party there. Well, at the same time, there's an agreement, you know, amongst both the so-called liberals and conservatives in both the can and both in Canada and the United States that essentially, I mean, to be frank, like, fuck black and indigenous people and fuck black and indigenous movements, like they are united on that front. As much as they try to distinguish themselves, you know, as being, you know, a conservative or a liberal. And I want to, I want to hear both of your thoughts on that because it seems, I mean, Robin, you both of you just said, like, going back to that, it's like, you can see and remember what it was like to throw a statue into the into the water to like light a statue on fire to see a statue crumble, you know, and now that honestly just doesn't seem possible. Like it doesn't seem possible in this moment. But nonetheless, there is a, I think you both of you are talking about a certain kind of possibility with certain worlds ending, even even in a moment of reaction. I think there's always a backlash after any, any steps that we may, indigenous or black movements make. And we've seen that over and over again from, and I've seen it in my lifetime beginning with the so-called Oka crisis. And so I think we have to be prepared for that backlash, and we have to think strategically through that backlash because we know it's coming. I think this idea of constellations of co-resistance and having deep meaningful relationships across anti-colonial movements is important because often the backlash will be pointed towards other indigenous people or black people. And if you have the the the sister movement uprising at the same time as the backlash, I think you can start to propel things in a different way. I think that we have to remember that as much as I loved those racist statues going into the the ocean, there's an element of that that's that's symbolic. And there's an element of that that's performative. And there's an element of that that doesn't bring necessarily signal the kinds of structural changes and the new worlds that I think we're talking about in this book. So I don't want to crush anyone's joy because I also felt I felt joy in those moments, but I think I think that the study part of this is that we're seeing these sorts of patterns repeating over and over and over again. And we have to think across movements and with movements and figure figure out strategies for maintaining momentum during the times of extreme backlash. And I think tomorrow is Canada Day, which is a racist celebration of genocide dispossession and white supremacy. But this year it's not even the normal celebration is just for the regular racists. And then the the the sort of populist movements that we're seeing on the right is having its own counter protests because the normal celebrations aren't racist enough. So I think this I think that that side of things is organized and there have been organized for a number of years and they've been fighting for a number of years. And I think that I think that we have to recommit ourselves to struggle and recommit ourselves to building worlds beyond whether or not we feel hopeful that they're they're going to come into existence in our lifetime or not. I think that the backlash as I think you've both highlighted was because of the power that was demonstrated was because of how widespread these ideas of the necessity of transformation of the idea that another world beyond racial violence, beyond economic violence, beyond the ongoing legacies of slavery and colonialism that another world is possible that as Walter Rodney says that another world is necessary. So the backlash I think we need to remember occurs because of the fact that so many people that so many I'm that so many people across the country across many countries, you know, including the end SARS movement in Nigeria are really we're really beginning to demand something radically new. So I think that at the same time as so many people woke up to again to use this idea of wokeness but really woke up to these realities or reminded of this realities and began to get organized. The backlash I think we need to remember as we're living through it even as it's something that is so really awful to experience is also showing everybody who learned about the necessity of racial justice, just how hard the carceral state will push back. And if anything is exposing the kind of true organized violence that we are up against. So that's something that I'm really trying to remind myself of this moment of, you know, that I guess how important it is to continue struggle beyond these spectacular moments, beyond these street-based moments and beyond the times that it feels like we're winning, right? Because I think we had a moment where many of us do the we were experiencing a taste of what it could feel like to really see substantive win in our times. And I think that what's happened structurally is making us feel very difficult from that. But I think it's this reminder that despite that we need to be organized because what we're up against is so in this moment openly nakedly barbaric, right? If we look to the current news, if we look through what Leanne pointed out about the freedom convoys who are also very much part of anti-immigration, racist, anti-trans movements specifically. If we look to today's news about the stripping of EPA powers, about the role, you know, the recent court decisions of the rollback of Indigenous control over territories, the overturning of row that were up against, you know, a system that is not, that is really so destructive to so many life royals. at the same time. I keep thinking of Du Bois's words, where he says, "I'm given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever." And I think that we're seeing this last clinging, this really intense violent defense of the ownership of the earth and all of its inhabitants of women and trends and gender non-gain-warming people's bodies. And as we're seeing this insistence of ownership, we're also seeing even if it's not as visible now, a total refusal of these logics, right? A total refusal of this kind of racial violence. So I think that the networks that we saw and that we that happened during the Watt-Sowaton, Anticolonial uprisings, during the Black uprisings around the world, those networks are not gone. And I think that we need to take this valuable information that we learned about what it means to bring people into movement and to really take quite seriously, I guess, the threat that we're up against. I think this is a moment to remind us that although it is also important to be celebrating in the streets that there is really important and life-saving and work to do at this time. Throughout the conversation that you have in this book, I think the question of land is central to a lot of the relationships that the two of you make, specifically, you know, it's like a material thing because you are meeting at a place called Dishinta, which Leanne and I believe Glenn cultured, it's a land pedagogy school and you talk about this encounter that you've had with a Black activist and indigenous activists and kind of discussing land as central to a certain kind of solidarity that can be built. And I feel like there's several questions that I want to ask, but I guess I'll just ask a basic question, but why is land central to the liberation of both Black and indigenous people and why is something like land as pedagogy is practiced in a place like Dishinta, you know, important and not just, you know, doing what I've been reading a lot of reconciliation literature lately and it's like it's all centered on like whiteness. I feel like about like, you know, you know, how do you bring white people into these conversations, bring them to the land, you know, there's all this very bizarre stuff, but I feel like Dishinta is doing something different and I don't know, Leanne, if you can maybe speak a little bit about that and why it's important to this particular book and this particular project. I think it's important because racial capitalism is destroying the planet right now and has been for for five centuries and so that's one sort of immediate reason is important. I think that in my work at the Dishinta Center for Research and Learning, which is a Dene land-based political project, we were thinking about developing relationships with other movements because that was so important to the Dene in the 1960s and 1970s when they were opposing a pipeline and so they were doing a lot of reading. They were they visited Tanzania. They were engaged in a global anti-colonial struggle and that that seemed important to them at the time and important to us. And so we invited a group of Black and Brown and Indigenous organizers, activists, thinkers and academics to spend time with us on the land in Yelena's Dene territory in March and Robin was one of those participants and and so was I. And we didn't have an agenda, we didn't have a series of research objectives. Our idea was was just to be on the land together, sharing food, sharing stories in this sort of Dene environment and to see sort of what kinds of things happened, what kinds of conversations came out and how we think about how we were relating to each other. And so I think for Robin and I, we recognized that the land and being out on the land in this environment brought forward a different kind of thinking and a different set of questions than had we met in a bar in a city or at a conference or in a classroom at the university. And it became really clear that land and our relationship to land was important for Indigenous peoples and it was important for Black peoples and that there was a lot of generative space in a refusal of racial capitalism and a refusal of heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. And so from that gathering, Robin and I planned to meet in in my own territory and make maple sugar. We planned to to go on walks in downtown Toronto. We talked about exchanges between freedom schools. We talked about all of these different ways of deepening the relationship and then the pandemic hit. So for me, I wanted to start to have these conversations with Black thinkers and organizers and scholars in a different register than what I had been seeing on on Twitter and the ways that land was sort of weaponized to create a chasm between Indigenous movements and Black movements. And I wanted to think more broadly, I think, about the ways that genocide and dispossession and transatlantic slavery had impacted us and created different histories that were also intertwined and linked. And I think that that idea, I think it's Ruthie Wilson Gilmore that says you've got to organize with the people that are organizing to bring forth these new worlds that really resonated with me. And I think that shifting sort of this initial meeting to the land was one that brought about an intimacy, a level of trust. I mean, it's not an easy thing to accept an email invite to go to the north in minus 20 and right around on snowmobiles and fishnats. It's it's it was an active faith that that anyone even came to the gathering. And I think that that same sort of vulnerability and intimacy carried over to this letter writing project. Thank you so much for that, Leanne. I've just been thinking about how much writing and thinking with Leanne about abolition and anti-colonialism really pushed me to think more extensively about land and policing and what freedom means for us collectively. So I think that coming up in communities that have been struggling against police murdering black folks in city streets in their cars on the subways, you know police raises of Somali families in their homes in Jane and Finch, this kind of militarism of black people's life in cities. And as I've read more extensively about, you know, as I've read Leanne's work as I've Ellen Gabriel's work and more broadly, I think that it's really pushed me to think about the role of policing of land defense movement, you know, even just in the year 19 19 to 2020, excuse me, the RCMP spent almost 20 million dollars policing with Soatin territory, right? So the policing of land defense is a really crucial way to understand what and how policing takes place. And there's this, the words of Stenigley's anti-colonial filmmaker, Uzman Senvene, that stick with me always and are really trying to bring in throughout the text because there's just something that lives in my mind where he's speaking about the colonizers in the context of the African continent. And he says they've never invented anything to make earth habitable. Everything they do is to destroy the land. And for me, that really helped remind me that it helped me think more deeply about the fact that all colonialism, not only just settler colonialism, was about, you know, land theft and the converting of lands in the ways that indigenous Africans, the ways that indigenous people across North and South America related to land. And also the really important role that policing has served in the colonial context and still serves to sever indigenous peoples from their lands, from non-capitalist ways of relating to the land. I'm really working in the service of those who are trying to thief land and to make it into something else and to make it into private property. So it really helped. It's helping me think about the ways that all carceral sites and technologies are also importantly about cementing the theft of land so that we can't build different kinds of worlds and different kinds of relationships or return to those that had previously been there. So if we think about, you know, the roles that prisons and conflict labor played in holding and keeping African territories and peoples under European control, the substantial networks of prisons that were used that were perfected in the coastal forts that were built for the slave trade, right? That these are really important technologies globally that are, that really relate the history of policing and carceral practices more broadly directly to to control over land. And if we look to, for example, what happened in Haiti where the laveless movement undertook, you know, a lot of different kinds of reforms in terms of education and labor, but also radical and redistribution before Canada alongside the United States, alongside France, organized a coup d'état. And, you know, most Canadians are not aware of the fact that Canadian police are still present in Haiti that the SPVM, you know, the Sylvia Celephone Estelle, Moriel, the Montreal police, you know, you get reports stating only a few years back about Montreal police sexually assaulting women in Haiti about funding for Correctional Services Canada, again, building prisons in Haiti, really cementing a violently enforced coup d'état in imperialism, right? So I think that, while originally my thinking about policing and land was, I think, really opened by understanding the policing of land defense here where I live and thinking about my ethical commitment because of the place that I live on stolen indigenous land is something that I also think about expansively, given the role of Canadian carceral controls, still being used to cement land expropriation on a global scale. Just the last thing that I wanted to say was I also think that something that, as the environmental movement, Alfredin asked us to think of all environmentalism as something that's white, you know that the history of anti-colonial struggle, whether that's in North America or globally, shows us something so incredibly different and Nick, what you opened with, I think, highlights that so importantly that people on the forefront of land defense have so often been black folks, indigenous folks, Afro-Indigenous women in particular, I think we can really see on the forefront of the struggle against environmental devastation against extraction. So really thinking about how globally our communities are, you know, playing as such a crucial struggle to think about land differently and of course being harmed in police at the same time for that. Yeah, there's a long vendetta against Haiti for essentially breaking the spell of inviability around whiteness. And I think that, you know, there's, that was one of the first things that I, when I began to read about anti-colonial resistance movements that always kind of stuck with me was the question of Haiti and how the idea of black freedom, you know, was one of the impetuses behind not only the so-called revolution of 1776, which arguably could be called a counter-revolution that we've been undergoing for the last 250 years, was motivated by fears of black freedom and indigenous sovereignty. I mean, it's written in the US Declaration of Independence, you don't need, you know, you doesn't get any more explicit than that. But another, you know, another kind of aspect of that is, you know, today, and, Leanne, you mentioned this discourse on Twitter, you know, around Afro-Pessimism and anti-black racism within indigenous communities. I think there's a tendency, as somebody who, I don't do as much organizing as I used to in the past, but, you know, somebody who has organized and has recruited young indigenous and black folks to, you know, certain spaces, oftentimes people become politicized through social media and through Twitter spaces, and they encounter these conversations and debates that oftentimes aren't helpful and oftentimes aren't grounded in any other space but discourse. And so it becomes a really difficult task, you know, to kind of undo those things and to actually build a real community and a real kind of common struggle with folks. And I was wondering if, I think some of the, like, what you talk about in this book and what you're writing, it's actually speaking back against what some people think is, like, intractable, or, what would you call it, I'm trying to think of a word, "intractability between indigenous and black movements." I think I actually not intractable, but are often just created or reproducing the same kind of liberal tropes because they're centered in trauma narratives and they're not centered in liberation narratives. And when, you know, like, for me personally, when I read, when I look back on, you know, just the indigenous movement, I'll just speak of that because I know I'm very familiar with the history, there's a distinct kind of shift around the 80s and 90s when you know, the horizon of struggle became liberation, you know, sovereignty, self-determination, and autonomy from the nation-state to one where we're trying to get the nation-state to recognize the injury that has caused to us. We're, you know, to speak of Arthur Manuel. We're literally crying on the shoulder of the man who stole our land, like, recognize our trauma. And so when that kind of trauma politics becomes the kind of horizon of struggle, recognize our trauma, say you're sorry, you know, it doesn't really get us to a point where, you know, we've accomplished anything beyond just saying, you know, we did this to you and, you know, this is our politics and I don't really see like an endgame there. And so I was wondering if there's something about what you're doing that is pushing back against that particular narrative because I see it within, even though you're not explicit about it, I see it within both of the ways that you're writing. One of the things that I think Robin says in this book that I think about almost every day is that we have this responsibility to every day get up and make the world and and relearn the world. And I think that's a really instructive sort of practice that really fits into how I think Indigenous, my Indigenous ancestors would have lived every day getting up and literally making all of the relationships and the networks that sustained Indigenous life. And so for me, that means reading very broadly. And I think folks like Sadega Hartman and Hortons Spillers and Sylvia Winter and Fred Moten have been really have had a huge influence on the way that I think I think reading the literature around pessimism is important. And I think that I've learned things from that. I think that it's important to go back and sort of read the texts and not just the tweets. I think it's really crucial to develop and maintain and nurture real world relationships and to be engaged in community and to be engaged in meeting the material needs of communities as not just an ethical practice, but as a site of knowledge generation. I think that when we come together whether we're on the land or whether we're in the city or whether we're supporting incarcerated people, when we come together and we are organizing to meet those needs, that's us that's how we develop the theory that is going to assist us in bringing forth these these new worlds. So my sort of own practice is based on I think those things because I don't want to replicate the nation state and all of its violences. I don't want land back if it means an enclosure and a fence and borders and private property and an army because that's counter to every ethical practice that I have as a human and as an inishnada human. So I'm super interested in figuring out how to come up with formations that I think my ancestors would be proud of and that are not based on the replication of the kinds of territoriality that this state and it's all of its processes for recognition are constantly telling me is the only option. I feel like every morning we have this opportunity to get up and remake a different world. And I think that that's what drew me to Robyn's work and that's what kind of kept me writing these letters through 2020. Yeah I don't even know how much I can add to that. I think that for me something that is so important for me to remember I guess it's the importance of struggle across communities that I can't conceive of black liberation living in a place where we still are you know quite literally on the unmarked grave of our indigenous kin upon whose land we're on. I think that recognizing the interdependencies of our liberation struggles is something that is absolutely crucial. And in the times where we've seen I think something like black power or black anti-colonial movements present actually much more of a threat to the world order than we are able to do right now I think that we've seen really important cross organizing across colonized people organizing across different people who are experiencing both global and local kinds of racial violence. So I always think to the words of Ashanti Austin who's a former black panther, movement elder and you know survivor of the war on black people that came before ours who says if people in Puerto Rico are fighting for independence you don't have to agree with all the ways they envision that but you know that they have the right to conduct their struggle in the best way that they need to get the boot of imperialism off their neck right so that we have to support globally the ways in which people are trying to fight against a system of domination that will quite literally kill most of the earth's inhabitants as we're seeing if you read you know the IPCC reports so I think that we don't have time to think about waging freedom without all of the other people who are attempting to do so at this time and remembering that those who have fought and won have usually undertaken enormous amounts of people that it takes people seeing their own liberation as bound up in one another and I think that's something that's true for as true for black liberation struggle as it is as it is for any other that if we can't conceive of freedom as collective and as collective beyond any kind of you know just period a collective period right if we can't think about freedom in that way then we're thinking about in a way that as the answer really is subject to a kind of enclosure to always creating a continual kind of outside that we continue to see, whether that's for sexual or gender presentation, whether that's for ethnicity, you know that we continue to create these different kinds of hierarchies than it's really important to struggle beyond and outside of that. - To have like a final question to think about in terms of what this book is, I guess what it says to me and how I've engaged it is, you both are writing about the end of worlds and two kind of sense. One is the end of our worlds and the kind of, I was reading my friend Natalie Diaz's blurb on this and she calls it an omniside, which is essentially like the, or no, Naomi Klein says that, the omnisidal times, which is like the end of everything, right? There's a apocalypse literature, you know, plague literature is like a very popular thing right now. We have the six extinction event, we have catastrophic climate change, but also I think you're also talking about the end of this world that seemed permanent. One that makes itself seem as if it ends, it's the end of everything else. And that's the site of settler colonial world, this world that has established itself through the replacement of ours of our world, both black and indigenous worlds, to make itself seem as the only alternative that's available. And as much as there's a lot of pessimism in terms of like the inability to reform, you know, if white supremacy and genocide are baked into the cake of Canada and the United States, you can't bake a cake, right? So where does that leave us? Because I feel like you're both optimistic and maybe optimism isn't the correct word. It's not, it's like a, I guess what would it be called? It's a, it's a, I don't know what it would be called, a dystopian realism, I guess, of what is possible because you are arguing for the end of a certain, I guess like a settler homicide, basically, the end of a certain settler ontology, the idea that this is the only option available to us, even though it's driving us to our death, you know? And to say, actually this isn't, if we reframe the terms of what a world, you know, would look like that would be beneficial to not just human life, but also to other than human life, these are the terms in which that world is coming into being. And so what, you know, what is that optimism? And maybe I'm, again, like I'm just, I'm putting words in your mouth and maybe it isn't optimism, maybe it isn't hope, but what is that kind of vision that you see as emerging amidst this very kind of nightmare as present that we're facing right now? - Something that I find it still helpful to remember is that our communities, Black people's globally, indigenous people globally, have already survived multiple apocalypse, right? The apocalypse is a slavery of saraclonalism, of colonialism, more broadly, and still continue to hold worlds within us and continue to try to build other kinds of world and other kinds of world orders. So I think when I think about the end, that there are many possible world endings on the future, right? So I'm not a prophet and I'm not an optimist and that I say that one is definitely, that the good one is going to happen, right? But I think that we have to aim towards the most livable future that we can and just act as if it's possible to build it. So I think that if we think about, you know, the very apocalyptic predictions of the IPCC reports in terms of floods and famines and everything that will happen if we do not change the terms in which we live, that what that reminds us is not to embrace this sort of apathetic end of the world and an apocalyptic point of view, but to think about the end of this world, right? The world built by racial capitalism, the world premised on ongoing gendered violence and to us, you're in a new one, right? To think about with Ruthie Gilmore's words, where life is precious, life is precious. So I think that if we think about the idea that world ending and world making can happen at the same time, I think that the project of abolition is a project of world building as much as there's a project of ending the kinds of violent world borders that we see today. It's a project of world making. And decolonization wasn't is a project of world making that extend well beyond the kinds of formations that we have today that I think can allow us to believe, at least that there is the possibility of building a world beyond the kind of ongoing extraction and the canting of anybody who would stop that, and would conceive of something differently, right? That we still live in a planet that has the resources to house and feed and care for all of its inhabitants. And as long as that remains possible, then it's important for us to continue that struggle, whether or not we think it's likely that we will, you know, the word wind feels not strong enough here, right? But whether or not it's possible, whether or not we think it's possible or likely that we could get to there to believe that, given the world making capacities of our ancestors who survived 500 years of apocalyptic violence, that survival is itself in some ways, you know, a testament to the power of struggle and to take that seriously and to take that as a kind of inheritance and a responsibility to the people who, against enormous odds and enormous violence held those worlds inside of themselves and to pass that down to our kids into theirs as well. - I think my favorite part of this book is just, it's mostly, I think, Robin's parts of just making visible and seeing and affirming all of the world making practices that are going on globally from, you know, from Palestine to the African continent to South America to black kids in Montreal organizing to get cops out of their schools. And so I like this idea of world making as sites of care, as sites of joy, as sites of knowledge generation. And I like this idea of world gathering. So gathering sort of all of these different worlds together and figuring out how to make a network where life is precious, where we are thinking about not just human life, but all of the life that we share time and space with. And so for me, that's part of what I loved writing about this book and these letters is just every morning I got up and I spent so much time in this kind of world gathering space. And I think Robin's right, our people have lived through so many apocalypses. And I know, you know, Nick and I come from cultures that just have so many stories about world building and new worlds and how that's replicated an individual life and family life and community life and the lives of indigenous peoples internationally. And so I feel like that's the kind of gift of this book is in the process of world making. I think that's where the connection is, that's where the love is, that's where the care is and that's where that, as Nureem Cabas says, that's where that discipline and practice of hope is. - Yeah, thank you so much for sharing, you know, this book with the world is probably one of my favorite. I wrote a letter to, or an email to Anthony. It is true, like when I read books, I remember, like the books that I liked the most, I remember the context in which I read them. And I read this in the context of traveling to Brazil as I explained earlier. And so this is a book that I feel like really spoke to me in the moment in time that, you know, I was kind of moving through the world and trying to make sense of what was happening, you know, post, post 2020 in the uprisings. But I also just, I would also really like about this is that it kind of slows time down a bit because I think there's a tendency to kind of speak to the kind of headline grabbing, you know, spectacular as you were talking about earlier Robin. And really what are, you know, while there's like the fast news, like really what our struggles are, it's like the slow news. It's like we've been dealing this for centuries and I think that's a much more comforting perspective in terms of, you know, we are just continuing what our ancestors have always done to us, to, I guess, playoff of Leanne's book, as we have always done, which has also been an inspiration to a lot of our work in the Red Nation, but also in Indigenous movements as well. And I just really want to thank you both for taking the time for talking today, but also just sharing this book with the world. I know it's intimate kind of letters that you've written, intimate conversation, but you know, just to be a fly on the wall has been, you know, really moving for me. But before we go, I was, can I just ask you both to, you know, share any kind of, you know, websites where we can find more of your work or how people can connect with what you're doing right now. - So, my website is robinmainart.com, our obYN, M-A-Y-N-A-R-D. com and I'm on Twitter at policing black. I'm not on social media, but I do have a website, leansinson.ca and leansinson music. and you can see a lot of the work, or the organizing work that I'm doing in the north to Chinta.ca. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]