Episode 6 - Beautiful Forms of Resistance
How do we find freedom from the relentless demands of capitalism? How do we cultivate rest as a radical act of resistance and revolution? How do we learn from, centre, and support Indigenous sovereignty? How do we learn from Black organizing and resistance, and see Indigenous and Black liberation as coexisting side-by-side? How do we avoid the co-opting of grassroots movements, and stay clear headed about who we are in solidarity with?
Poet, scholar, and community organizer Erica Violet Lee joins Reseed host Alice Irene Whittaker for a powerful conversation about freedom, resistance, and belonging. Erica is a two-spirit nehiyaw writer from inner-city Saskatoon and Thunderchild Cree Nation. She is a Steering Committee member of Indigenous Climate Action, and she has worked with Idle No More, the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition, and the David Suzuki Foundation among others in the pursuit of Indigenous feminist freedoms. She has spoken around the world for people in universities and community organizations alike. She has been published in outlets like The Guardian and the CBC. Erica’s work relates to Indigenous freedom, governance, law, sovereignty, feminism, love, and joy.
At its heart, this conversation is about the pursuit of freedom. It is about relationships to land, and to each other. It is about safeguarding the integrity and authenticity of grassroots movements, instead of branding and absorbing them into the dominant order by celebrating only their most palatable and non-threatening aspects. This is a conversation about the power of words and poetry to change the world, and feeling the rage and love of this moment at which we are alive - and remembering that our rage is a form of love.
Episode Show Notes
Leah Penniman - Soul Fire Farm
BlackLife by Rinaldo Walcott and Idil Abdillahi
On Property by Rinaldo Walcott
Transcript
Alice Irene Whittaker (intro): Welcome to Reseed, a podcast about repairing our relationship to nature. Reseed tells the stories of a RE generation: the people embracing repair, redesign, reuse, and reduction. The people who are uprooting the extractive status quo and rooting the future in justice, wellbeing, resilience, and care. This is a podcast for those of us who are re-imagining our relationship to the natural world and to each other. I am Alice Irene Whittaker, the host of Reseed. Together, let's plant the seeds that transform us from being takers to caretakers.
Alice Irene: Welcome. In today's episode, I speak with Erica Violet Lee, a two-spirit Nêhiyaw writer, scholar, and community organizer from inner-city Saskatoon and Thunderchild Cree Nation. She is also a Steering Committee member of Indigenous Climate Action. In this conversation, Erica speaks to me about the pursuit of Indigenous feminist freedoms, lessons learned from the Black liberation movement, the power of rest and radical community care, and beautiful forms of resistance.
Erica Violet Lee: It's so freeing to do something in a capitalist world that allows me to basically feel for a living. To feel and think and write and do what I really love to do, which is something I'll never take for granted. And I wish that everybody had that freedom in their lives to just be free from the relentless work of capitalism, that capitalism demands from us and from our bodies.
Alice Irene: Erica Violet Lee is a community organizer, scholar and poet from Treaty Six in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan on the lands currently referred to as Canada. Her work relates to Indigenous freedom, governance, law, sovereignty, feminism, love and joy. The last sentence of her Twitter bio reads, “we are the morning birds that sing against the sky.”
Erica: The things that I do to keep myself going are reconnecting with the people I love in my life, reading a lot of poetry and just feeling what I'm feeling and recognizing those feelings as a valid reaction to the world we live in right now, whether it's rage or love and recognizing that rage is a form of love.
Alice Irene: As a young scholar, Erica creates and studies Indigenous philosophy, embodied geographies, and decolonial feminist future epistemologies. Erica has worked with Idle No More, the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition and the David Suzuki Foundation among others in the pursuit of indigenous feminist freedoms.
Alice Irene: She's spoken around the world for people in universities and community organizations alike. She writes love poems and algorithms for the future on her blog, moontimewarrior.com and she's been published in outlets, such as the CBC and the Guardian. Erica is also a member of the Steering Committee of Indigenous Climate Action, an organization that reinforces the place of Indigenous peoples as leaders in climate change discourse. They articulate their work like this, Indigenous Climate Action is an Indigenous-led organization guided by a diverse group of Indigenous knowledge keepers, water protectors, and land defenders from communities and regions across the country.
Alice Irene: They rightly believe that Indigenous peoples rights and knowledge systems are critical to developing solutions to the climate crisis and achieving climate justice. You'll hear my conversation with Erica in just a few moments. First, I'll let you know that I released another episode today called Reclaiming Land Back with Bryanna Brown, originator of Land Back and Labrador land protector. Bryanna and I have a conversation about reinforcing Indigenous leadership in the climate movement, land back, Indigenous sovereignty and reconnecting with one's voice and amplifying the voices of others.
Alice Irene: Like Erica, Bryanna is on the Steering Committee of Indigenous Climate Action. And this pair of conversations is insightful and powerful, and I hope you enjoy them both. If these conversations are resonating with you, please leave a review on Apple podcasts. I enjoy reading what you think about what I'm creating and it's helpful in these first early weeks of Reseed. If you want to tell me what you think of this or any other episode, you can find me at Ressed.ca. Here is my conversation with Erica Violet Lee.
Alice Irene: Hi Erica, thanks so much for joining me today.
Erica: It's so good to meet you. I am a fan of your podcast and I'm excited to be on it today.
Alice Irene: Oh, thanks. That means a lot. The honor is all mine. I should have asked if you like Erica Violet or Erica, and I of all people should ask this because I have two names.
Erica: That's so funny. I was just looking at your name and thinking, oh no, what should I say? I have friends who call me by my initials EVL. So they shortened it to evil, which is an unfortunate nickname but it's stuck and I kind of, I think it's cute. And now my mom is like, oh, I should have given you a different middle initial than V.
Alice Irene: How could she ever know, right?
Erica: And then sometimes people call me by my full name Erica Violet Lee, but you can call me Erica. How do you prefer to be referred to?
Alice Irene: I like Alice Irene, but I have tried many combinations and have changed it over the years so I'm pretty flexible, but I do like both. I'd love to start with your relationship with the natural world as a child - what your relationship with nature was when you were a kid?
Erica: My relationship with nature as a child was highly informed by the fact that I grew up in inner-city Saskatoon on the prairies in the land currently referred to as Canada. Being a Cree person and Indigenous person growing up in an urban space and thinking about what that means, like the complications of that, but also the beauty of that.
Erica: And I feel really grateful. I feel really grateful for having grown up in a space, even with a house growing up in a house in this neighborhood is such a luxury. And then growing up in a house with a backyard was an even bigger luxury. So I got to run around and daydream, and I remember having imaginary friends and that I would run around and play with cause I was an only child. My relationship to the earth when I was young was so deeply shaped by the urban environment. And I think that's a distinct but growing experience for Indigenous young people. So it's been important to me moving forward to let people know that experience is every bit as legitimately and validly Indigenous as growing up on a reserve or growing up on the land, whatever that means, right? Because to me, the inner-city is the land.
Alice Irene: Reinforcing Indigenous leadership in the climate movement is central to the work that you're doing with Indigenous Climate Action. Can you paint me a picture of what that looks like?
Erica: Growing up in the inner-city in Saskatoon has informed so much of my idea of home, my idea of belonging, where I come from, who I am accountable to, who my relations are, who I'm in solidarity with. And I think about this all the time. And I think honestly it's probably for me the defining factor of what Indigeneity looks like beyond any weird notions of blood quantum or any Indian Act governance structures or anything that the Government of Canada tries to tell us is what our identity and our lives should look like.
Erica: So for me, the leaders that I follow are my mentors I would say and the people that I trust our people who have deep relationships with the land. I think immediately of Sylvia McAdam Saysewahum, who is a Nêhiyaw writer and land defender. She is one of the women who was responsible for the first Idle No More gatherings back in 2012, which was and is an Indigenous movement for climate, for self-determination, for something more than what we've been taught as Indigenous people that we're supposed to expect. So that's what I grew up in. The leaders I look to are folks like Sylvia, who didn't care where I came from, didn't care that I grew up in the inner-city in urban Saskatoon, like who saw my knowledge of the land in that space as totally valid, as totally useful. Who'd never excluded me from the category of being Cree or being Nêhiyaw because I couldn't speak the language or because I didn't grow up on reserve.
Erica: And so, it's people like that. I think of also Romeo Saganash. I am kind of a Romeo Saganash fan girl actually. We are friends as well, and his daughter Maïtée Saganash as well is such an amazing powerful leader. Just runs in the family I think. They have both inspired me to think about the things we're told are possible for our people are possible for people in general. And another person I would name is Ellen Gabriel. I remember having this interaction with Ellen Gabriel, where we were at a gathering for climate, which is usually where we run into each other.
Erica: She wasn't wearing a skirt. She was wearing pants. And I prefer not to wear skirts in ceremonial settings either, which is sometimes seen as like a very transgressive action, depending on the elders in charge, depending on the leaders in charge of the meeting. So, I went up and sat next to her and I said I'm so glad that you're also like just wearing what you feel most comfortable in rather than like what is prescribed to us as Indigenous women. And she said, yeah, I just like to be comfortable. Like it was no big deal. Like it was just, you know, she had no qualms about being who she was, being true to herself and exercising self-determination not only in a governance sense, like a broad political governance sense, but in an embodied being true to yourself and honoring yourself and respecting what your needs are as a person who relates to the land and relates to community.
Erica: The last person that I think of when I think of governance and people who have taught me how to be in this world is my mom. I grew up being very close to my mom - I still am. And she teaches me every day not to give in to this sense of doom that we're presented with. And that actually to believe that the world is just over and that there's nothing we can do about it is such a luxury and it's a privilege. And it's something that we don't have because this is the earth that we belong to, right? We are part of the earth. So, we can't give up on each other. We can't give up on the things we believe in, the things that we know are worth saving, and she's the person who taught me that and teaches that to me.
Alice Irene: That's so beautiful. Something I've been thinking a lot about the last couple of years is exactly that doom and hope don't matter. Like we often frame it like, but can we make a difference? Is there time? What makes one helpful? And I really have come to the conclusion that that doesn't matter because when you love something and they are your family or your mother or whoever you love deeply that you care for her, care for them, regardless of outcome or how it's going to turn out. You just, you care because that's what we do and who we are and something that we have to offer. And I think it's often framed in that way of, you know, oh, but you know, it's over, there's not time to your point. We don't have that luxury. And that's not even really the question I don't think.
Erica: Absolutely. It isn't the question. And I love the way that you frame that. I especially have been thinking about this recently in terms of disability justice and care work. So many of my friends, even like my own age in their like late twenties, early twenties, thirties, have been struggling with the pandemic in ways that have basically taught us that we do identify as disabled, that we identify as chronically ill as neurodivergent and what care means in that context. And so there's so many overlapping factors that influence our lives like the pandemic has brought out a lot of this, climate change is bringing out a lot of it.
Erica: And then just the fact of being embodied brings out a lot of it. Really focusing on care work, which looks like, you know, it can be as simple as making care packages for people. Or checking in with people is a huge one that my friends circle, my people who I'm close to, and even my acquaintances, do for each other all the time is we just check in, especially on days that we know are going to be hard for one another. And just that little extra bit of care keeps you going. For me, I remember my friend, Danielle, when I was in Toronto in grad school, sent me this gift package and it wasn't anything extravagant or expensive. She didn't go out to a bunch of stores. It was just thoughtful little things, a lot of the things, a lot of things that she had made herself and she's in the middle of her PhD program.
Erica: So the fact that she had time to just gather all these little things, mementos that she thought would help me through my journey at the time was like the sweetest thing she could have done for me. And I just sort of think of that every time putting together a little gift package for someone is how I felt when I got that token of care from her. There are so many little things that we can do to make each other's lives so much better given the struggles that we're going through.
Alice Irene: Care is radical when it's fully embraced. So often we're in isolation or told to have our own sort of individualistic endeavors. And then when we care for each other and have that community, it can transform so much. The care package really speaks to me right now because we have COVID in my family right now. And so we can't go anywhere of course, and it's been a hard time. But our neighbor and dear friend, he comes to walk the dog and gave us a little bag with a grapefruit and orange and chamomile tea and chocolate in it.
Alice Irene: And it's just the brightest thing when you're having a hard time, but it really is powerful and just so sweet. As I understand it, your work at Indigenous Climate Action, where you're on the Board of Directors, it's grounded in four main pathways: gatherings, resources and tools, amplifying voices and supporting Indigenous sovereignty. Could you give me a bird's eye view of how those pathways sort of intersect, or if there's one of those that really speaks to you in your work?
Erica: My work with Indigenous Climate Action started, I think in 2016 or 2017. And what I appreciate most about working with Indigenous Climate Action is that they meet us where we're at. The organizers don't try to get us all to work at the same level on some like grand project or something. What it functions as is a support system for us to continue doing the work we're already doing - the work that we have been doing. The work that people have been doing already rather than trying to create something brand new, which I think is where so many movements fail is that they fail to acknowledge the history in which they're grounded.
Erica: The fact that we're never starting from square one. That there's always something to build upon. And for this, I specifically think of Black resistance movements and particularly Black feminist resistance movements, which for me have been an extreme source of realizing what organizing needs to look like in order to be effective. Teaching me about where my solidarities need to lie in order to be truly effective as an organizer, as someone who's in solidarity with other people as a relation in the world, to the world. And Indigenous Climate Action is very like cognizant of that kind of thing. Ultimately, it's a support network for those of us who are doing work all across the country, all across the world, the leaders of Indigenous Climate Action, their strengths lie in things like grant writing and ways to enable folks to continue doing beautiful work.
Erica: And I think that's such a great framework that I have so rarely seen in climate organizations or in any other organizations. So many folks, as you mentioned, are very individualistic and focused on doing their own thing that they forget there's so many other movements that need our support now that are like fully functional, fully formed. Have complete philosophies and research backing them. It reminds me kind of how useless I feel at this point, having been at the United Nations a couple of times, how useless that framework often feels because, or how inadequate it feels, given what we're facing. And the climate crisis, because every year there's a Conference of Parties on climate change. And every year I know people who go and come back feeling the same way that I felt when I went to COP21. And it's now like COP26 so like we got to change up something.
Alice Irene: Right. And with crises accelerating how they are, like you say, just so inadequate. It sounds like a couple of times in your responses that there's this deepened sense of belonging or relationships came up a few times. So where solidarities live, where relationships lie. Do you have anything more to add on that? On building relationships and on building belonging?
Erica: Yeah, for me growing up in Saskatoon was both really empowering and isolating because the prairies is a very specific place of a lot of very overt and visible violence toward Indigenous people and near complete erasure of Black struggle and Black life. So I was raised in that environment and I remember, I talk quite frequently about growing up in the era of Starlight tours and police violence against Native people in the prairies, basically after Neil Stonechild was murdered by the Saskatoon police. That was a few months after I was born.
Erica: So I grew up in the aftermath of that event and it's shaped my life in so many ways. So I always come back to that event. I always come back to that mindset. And it taught me quite early that police violence is such a huge part of what we're facing as Native communities, as Black communities, communities of color, disabled communities. Police intervention into our lives and state intervention into our lives is everywhere and it's absolutely a part of the bigger systemic problems that we face. Growing up in Saskatoon taught me quite early and also losing my uncle to police violence taught me quite early on that no one is coming to save us basically. There's no one protecting us except ourselves. And I mean that in the sense that we need to be there for one another, whether it's care packages or checking in.
Erica: There's this joke among my millennial friends, that we exchange the same $50 over and over again between ourselves just to keep going, and it's like the circular $50. And sometimes, you know, that's all it takes. Like it's just that little effort of community solidarity to make a huge difference in our lives. We get by with so little, but at the same time, it's so much to invest yourself into those relations and those structures that are truly genuine and rooted in love and rooted in good solidarities and being in good relation with each other. Repeat the question for me cause I know I had something else to say.
Alice Irene: I feel like you answered it beautifully and I'm so sorry that, I mean, sorry doesn't even do it justice. That you have to face that violence and that fear and that feeling that the people around you in large part are not there on your side. That’s really unjust. I was asking about belonging and relationship and if there's anything there.
Erica: Yeah, most of my life, like I did my undergraduate at the University of Saskatchewan and I was lucky enough to have - there's such a strong urban Indigenous community here that I never felt like I was missing out. I always felt a strong sense of community whether it was from just the fact that I grew up in a poor neighborhood and we have to rely on each other to survive. And then when I did my grad degree at the University of Toronto, which is a drastically different space than any space I've ever been to. It's the last space I ever expected to be in. I think the most rewarding part of being a Toronto for me, was getting to see the on the ground organizing that's taking place there, particularly within the Black community.
Erica: So, I think of places like Black Creek Community Farm, which is actually one of the first places that I went when I moved to Toronto. It's a community garden and farming sustainability space that they've set up. There’s this big beautiful house, where they often have art installations and they have all this land. And it's just outside of the city in the Jane and Finch neighborhood, which is a very racialized neighborhood, like a poor neighborhood. So it felt a lot like home. Black Creek Community Farm does all of these amazing food hampers and food sovereignty and food justice work that I would love to see pop up in other communities. So being in Toronto and getting to see that organizing and that history of organizing was so motivating for me to come back to the prairies and continue the work that we've been doing here with so few resources but realizing, you know, we also have so much comparatively. There's so much here to be grasped.
Erica: And it also made me think a lot differently about land and what it looks like to share land with our relations who have been dispossessed from their land, whether it's refugees and immigrants or Black folks or disabled folks who have been completely dispossessed from their space, the space that they deserve on the land. And our narrow understanding of what it means to actually be on the land or be with the land, which is so often abelist and expensive. Like you need to go to Canadian tire and get the most expensive hiking boots in order to reconnect with the land or something, which is not the case at all.
Alice Irene: It's almost branded in a way and then that becomes exclusive, you know, for the privileged few, this is what it looks like. And I think in so many spaces, you know, zero waste, reconnecting with nature, all of these different places, you invest a lot of money and those that can access it can now access it as it catches steam in certain circles. I'm really inspired by the work of Leah Penniman, if you know her from Soul Fire Farm, and she has a book, Farming While Black. The chapter I'm reading right now has a lot of that dispossession of land or this transfer to I think now 98% white ownership of all agricultural land in the US and what that very deliberate process has looked like over time.
Alice Irene: And how reclaiming it and their farm sounds similar - food sovereignty and similar issues. I really want to check out that one that you mentioned so thanks for sharing that with me. On the topic of co-opting language or ideologies or branding them. This is something that I think about a lot in terms of regeneration. So there is increasing mainstream attention and support for regeneration in terms of giving back instead of just taking or relationship of reciprocity with the earth. And that’s a good thing, I think in large part to have an awakening where people are caring about this more, but there's also this risk that it becomes co-opted or sanitized, or only the pleasing parts of it become celebrated.
Alice Irene: And so something I'm really conscious of and exploring is okay, how do we make sure that regeneration is not co-opted and that it stays with what you're saying? In solidarity with people that have been leading these movements for a long time and those roots take time to grow. And so wondering if you have any reflections on regeneration as a word or a concept or reciprocity? And do you have that same fear that it would be co-opted or is it in your viewpoint, a positive thing to have more people supporting regeneration?
Erica: This is a really interesting idea because I think about the same thing a lot, maybe not necessarily just with the term regeneration, but even the co-opting of the discourse that we create in order to free ourselves from dominant discourse. I think so often about what brought me to feminism and queer theory as like a young Native girl was because there weren't a lot of prairie Indigenous women who had the opportunity to write about stuff like that when I was growing up. Even a couple of decades ago, right? It's so new that we have access to things like multiple books on Indigenous feminisms and Indigenous queer theory.
Erica: What I grew up learning from was Black feminist and queer writers, like Audrey Lorde and Bell Hooks who recently passed. And it just devastated me. She was just a legend. Remembering that the first time reading Black feminist and queer writers that I realized how important words are and how important it is to have those words that describe and empower the situation that you're in. I think that's probably what led me to become a writer and a poet. It's so tricky when you see a word used out of the context you know where it came from. Which is usually from a grassroots context, which is quite often from Black and Indigenous theorists or writers, or however they want to view themselves or describe themselves. And you see it completely co-opted and whitewashed basically into something that is no longer threatening to the dominant order.
Erica: You see that with the idea of self-care, right? Which was started as a Black women's demand for like self-care in the face of extreme anti-Blackness. Self-care in a way that includes community care inherently. And it's been co-opted into this weird white women's self-care, but in a very capitalist sense. So it's only available to like wealthier white women. And so I think the same of the term regeneration. I think the same as the term decolonization. But I think the redeeming thing is that there's always going to be another word or phrase or poem or history or oral history, oral knowledge that can't be erased or corrupted and we can constantly be using these things as building blocks to move forward, to move beyond whatever they do to our language, however they co-opt it, however they co-opt our movements. There will always be people who see beyond that.
Erica: And so I think it's our task to inform ourselves. And I'm a big advocate of reading in whatever way that looks for you, depending on your ability. Or even listening to podcasts and keeping your mind sharp so it's not so easily fooled by these very mainstream, moderate, liberal movements to basically reform the system that is unreformable.
Alice Irene: Right. Incremental changes and saying it in a way that's palatable. I liked how you said when it's not threatening to the dominant order, but using that same language, that language that originally means so much it is threatening and then absorbing it in and spitting it out in this other way.
Erica: Yeah, definitely.
Alice Irene: You mentioned a bit of a different topic, but you mentioned being a writer and a poet. That's something that I'm really interested in. And I read that you write love poems and algorithms for the future. Is that true? And in general, just wanted to hear more about your writing and your poetry and how that expresses or feeds the other topics that we're talking about here.
Erica: After I went to grad school which honestly, I think anyone who's been to grad school will agree. I think most people, not all people, but most people would agree. It can be a very hostile environment. No matter how great your supervisors are, and no matter how hard they try, your professors try, your mentors and your colleagues try to give you a good experience. Academia is still so violent towards people who are queer, people who are disabled, people who are Black or Indigenous, and just in general, people who don't fit into the mold of academia which is very narrow and not as progressive as most people think it is.
Erica: So after I got my grad degree, I said that I was going to take off some time before going into my next degree to just spend a year or two writing and seeing how that went. Because writing has always been my first passion. Poetry has always been something that I love and something that I think can change the world because it's definitely changed my world many a time. Poetry devastates me in the best ways possible. And I gave myself a couple of years off from the grind of academia to do this very like precarious thing, actually, this risky precarious thing which is being a freelance writer.
Erica: And it actually turned out - really I have been very lucky in that I've had so much support from people around me who helped me pursue my writing. I've just been very, very privileged to work with people who enabled me to actually make a career out of it for the past couple of years. And it's so freeing, it's so freeing to do something in a capitalist world that allows me to basically feel for a living. To feel and think and write and do what I really love to do, which is something I'll never take for granted. And I wish that everybody had that freedom in their lives to just be free from the relentless work of capitalism, that capitalism demands from us and from our bodies, because I'm just so much healthier when I'm not in academia. And I think that would be true of many people in many professions.
Alice Irene: That's so freeing, just thinking of it, the vision. You mentioned a couple of times how you've been informed and inspired by Black organizing and Black resistance. I'd love to hear more about that journey and what you've learned.
Erica: Like I said, growing up on the prairies in Canada, Black life is so deeply erased, even though there is such a history here. My friend Omayra Issa, who works as a journalist, as a writer on the prairies, did a series called Black on the Prairies and she collected a bunch of stories and interviews of Black folks on the prairies. To disrupt and insert these stories of everyday life, everyday Black life into a world that has otherwise completely ignored it. And I think that series that she did was revolutionary and it's online available for free. I wrote a piece for it on what Native solidarity looks like in tandem supporting Black resistance and Black life. And when I say Black life, I'm directly referencing Rinaldo Walcott and Idil Abdillahi’s book, BlackLife. It's just a small little book published with ARP books out of Winnipeg. And it changed my life. Rinaldo Walcott was one of my supervisors at the U of T, just in discussions with him and in his classroom, it completely changed my idea of what it means for me to be Indigenous.
Erica: It made me realize that Black people are so often completely removed from the category of Indigenous. When in reality, that's the majority of Indigenous people in the world. And so much of what we consider Indigenous knowledge is also Black knowledge. And so it's one of those things, like once I saw it, I couldn't unsee that the deepness of that - how that structure impacts everything we do as non-Black people, the privileges we have in this world. And so when I think of Indigenous liberation, it's always beside Black liberation like that you can't exist without each other.
Erica: Another book I would recommend is Rinaldo Walcott’s On Property. He tells this beautiful story about growing up and stealing sugar cane from a sugar cane plantation that he lived by. And this idea of stealing sweetness and like grasping sweetness wherever you can get it. And always being like a fugitive as a Black person, as a Black man, no matter where he went as a Black queer man. Those ideas have informed me so deeply in what I want my resistance to look like, what I think our resistance as a whole lead needs to look like. In the sense that we're not free unless everybody is free. Particularly I think back to the thing I said about police violence and carceral violence and how there's a huge section of our population that are still in prisons, both Indigenous and Black. So many of those folks are people who I have known and who I've organized with, who have simply been disappeared by the settler state for no other reason than they considered criminalized as racialized people.
Alice Irene: I wanted to close with a question about generations and ancestors. I’m interested to hear how your ancestors impact your path and the work that you're doing, the change that you're creating and/or your own role as an ancestor in thread of generations.
Erica: One of the most immediate ways I think of when I think of my ancestors are the ancestors who would've made a fuss and would've not backed down and were shit disturbers. Because so often as a Native woman in organizing spaces or in spaces, academic spaces or writings - anywhere I go basically, people will often paint me as like aggressive or as a troublemaker for the sake of being a troublemaker. Or that girl who's always talking about politics as though it's like me as an individual and not literally millions of people on this planet who are pursuing the same types of freedom right now.
Erica: And to steel myself against all of that I think I totally had loud Cree ancestors who wouldn't let patriarchy push them around and wouldn't let white supremacy push them around. I had ancestors who escaped from prisons. I have family members who escaped from prisons. When I think of ancestors, I think of all of the beautiful transgressive, transformative, revolutionary things that they did and managed to do with so little. And it helps me put in perspective the days that I feel exhausted and like I can't continue fighting or continue struggling even for what I know is so deeply right in the world. And the things that are worth saving, the fact that we are worth saving. And I think of those ancestors and I think of the ancestors at the same time as I think of my family and my kin existing right now. And that's what strengthens me and empowers me to continue even when my body wants to give out or my mind is overwhelmed.
Erica: But at the same time, I want to leave space for one of my favorite Twitter accounts recently has been The Nap Ministry. And The Nap Ministry is run by a Black woman who talks about how capitalism, anti-Blackness and colonialism has fooled us into believing that we need to be productive in every minute of our lives. Otherwise we're like a wasted, it's a wasted life. And so she advocates for rest as a radical practice of resistance and revolution, particularly for Black women. But for everybody who's impacted by capitalism, colonialism, ableism, poverty. So for me, that was such a freeing way of thinking. We don't have to be productive all the time in a capitalist sense. Our survival is radical, but beyond that, the small things that we do every day to look after one another, to look after ourselves in radical ways and to build solidarities and kinships in places that they have been violently stolen from us.
Erica: All of those are beautiful forms of resistance. All of those are the reason we're alive in my perspective is to build those relationships and have those experiences, to delve into those feelings that we're not supposed to feel because we're supposed to be machines, you know, machines of capitalism and we’re not. The things that I do to keep myself going are reconnecting with the people I love in my life, reading a lot of poetry and just feeling what I'm feeling and recognizing those feelings as a valid reaction to the world we live in right now, whether it's rage or love and recognizing that rage is a form of love.
Alice Irene: It's rooted in love, right? That phrase, beautiful forms of resistance really strikes me in the heart when you said that. And I take away from this a lot around the longing on the one side, and then freedom that came up a lot. I’m very, very grateful for this and have lots to think on and I really appreciate you talking with me today.
Erica: Thank you, Alice Irene. I'm so grateful that you're doing this podcast. I think it's very necessary and I love that more and more people are having these conversations because we can't wait around anymore for people to give us, for the ruling class to give us space to have these conversations. We need to be having them amongst ourselves and that’s what spaces like this do so thank you.
Alice Irene: That was today's episode of Reseed. I'd love to hear what you thought about our conversation. Reseed is created on unceded Algonquin. Thank you to this place. Thank you to Rebecca Ryvola for podcast cover art and Teghan Acres for being an outside eye. And thank you for listening. Together, let's plant the seeds that transform us from being takers to caretakers.