Biskaabiyaang

History is my first love. Had I studied what I wanted when I took my first run at university it would have been history rather than the psychology program I eventually dropped out of. I had been told there was no money and no jobs in history, so I took psychology and one day asked myself why I was paying money to study something I didn't like just so I could spend the rest of my life doing a job I didn't like.

Yet look at how important knowledge of history is to our world. The lengths to which the US administration is going to rewrite US history to maintain white patriarchal delusions of grandeur. CBC Books asked me to write them a list of "must-read books" for Truth and Reconciliation Day. These are largely history books because we need to understand how we became a country that could warehouse children and their parents in an attempt to "civilize" them (my perspective? That was just the story they told to pacify others, their true intentions were much darker.). The same is true for understanding how slavery was justified and defended. Because when I read those histories today? I see the seeds of what is now going on, often the very same justifications being used to whitewash what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls "the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” in her book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California.

There is an effort to produce a new documentary about the Civil War that Keri-Leigh Merrit is part of called The Civil War and the Fight for the Soul of America. Merrit wrote the amazing book Masterless Men that examines the role of poor whites during the time of slavery and challenges the popular lost cause narrative that re-imagined antebellum life and romanticized it. Something that is very important to understand while the US crafts a modern lost cause narrative following the death of Charlie Kirk.

This blog is landing on September 30th. I didn't plan it that way, realized it as I was going through the scheduled release dates for these podcast episodes and it feels right. It feels particularly right to examine the stories that we've all been told because I'll tell you I no longer buy the notion that Canadians simply didn't know about residential schools. Too many people worked at them, lived near them. They were featured in National Film Board photo essays like that about the Sioux Lookout Blackhawks, smiling Indian boys playing that most Canadian of games, my uncles among them.

The book Beyond The Rink: Behind the Images of Residential School Hockey tells a much different story of course and that is what Canadians are wrestling with when they insist they had no idea. It's the stories that were told about the schools that are being challenged, not whether they existed at all. You can hear it in the residential school denialism littering the media, people who insist that it was education, that they were a social good and that the bad things that happened were unfortunate but unintended. I heard as much from those who were on a tour I sneaked into with a social work student. After an hour of hearing horror stories about the various rooms, the Q&A was dominated by questions like "but they meant well, surely they weren't all abusive." As if separating children from their families and indoctrinating them with the dominant religion, language, and social expectations wasn't inherently abusive no matter how nice some of the teachers were.

This is not a conversation about residential schools. it is a conversation about history, about who gets to tell the authoritative stories and whose stories are extra reading. It is a story about the gaps in our own stories, the relationships forgotten or ignored as we try to craft our own stories of dominance and meaning. And it is a story about coming together at the edges, listening to each others' stories and finding a common ground that is not narrated by whiteness.

Episode 4 Bad Indians Book Club Biskaabiyaang, returning to ourselves

Patty Krawec: This is Patty Krawec, your host and the author of Bad Indians Book Club Reading at the Edge of a Thousand Worlds. This podcast series, which formed the basis of the book, brought together marginalized writers and the people who read them. Biskaabiyaang is the idea of returning to ourselves, and in this episode we talk with authors Nick Estes, Tiya Miles, and Cheryl Savageau about the importance of returning to ourselves in the context of history, the stories we tell about ourselves and our past.  [ other panelists include Khadija Hammuda and Sean Carson. Recommended books included An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890-the Present, All Our Relations: Indigenous Trauma in the Shadow of Colonialism, The Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country, Mother/land, 1491: The New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, and Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empire, and Land in Early Modern North America.]

If each of us could introduce yourself, where you are, how your family got there, and then for those of us who aren't authors, we'll say what book we read and what surprised us about it. And for the authors, what we'd like to know in your introduction is what prompted your decision to tell this particular history?

Jenessa Gallenkamp: I'm Jenessa. I am in Niagara, which is also the land of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee. I am not from here originally. My family is from Tiny Ontario, which is like the Midland Penetanguishene area. My mother's side is Métis, and so that's quite a long history there. But I am here now and I read Tanya's book, All Our Relations, and I'm also currently still reading another book.

What surprised me about Tanya, I'll talk about Tanya's book since I finished that one. I think it was interesting how she talked about all of her relations. She didn't just focus on North America and that was cool 'cause I feel like a lot of the books I read are very like North American centric, which is, I live here, so that's, it's informative, but it's also very helpful to learn more about like the broader world and more Indigenous peoples outside of Turtle Island. The thing that stood out to me the most was probably just her facts on the Sámi People, because I feel like I don't know that much about them. So hearing about the fact that they actually do herd reindeer was like really cool and it was also very sad to hear a lot of the challenges that they faced in doing that now, just like with crossing the borders and stuff like that, and the massive size of the herds. So that was probably the most interesting thing for me.

Nick Estes: [Introduction in Lakota] My name is Nick Estes. I am calling in from Tiwa territory, also known as Albuquerque, New Mexico. And I'm here because I work here. So at the University of New Mexico. 

Cheryl Savageau: Cheryl Savageau [introduction in Abenaki]. My people are from the White Mountains and my mother's side is French. They were Acadian French, by which I mean they, they were settlers in Acadia and they were the same year that, that the English went into what's now Nova Scotia and forcibly removed all the French they also had bounties on Abenaki people in Maine. So, that particular history happened in my family affected in two different places. So my father's family is from Western Maine and into the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and I was in graduate school and writing the graduate school poem and realizing that everything that they were talking about didn't include our history and that if I tried to write about it, that was a problem. I've written about it. I written about it a lot. I actually, my book Mother/land came out. I initially thought of it as an un-history of Northeastern Turtle Island, I think was the original title because we don't do our history. Vine Deloria has talked about this, we don't do history so much as we do stories that are our own place. And because those stories, because I was being told over and over, don't tell these stories, don't talk about this. I decided I was gonna do that and not somehow focus on the moment of the invasion, but to tell the stories around place.

Tiya Miles: Hello everyone. I'm Tiya Miles and I am living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is Massachusett territory, and I'm originally from Ohio. My family traces its roots back to South Carolina, the Mississippi enslavement, and from there it becomes very difficult to trace one's ancestors if you're African American.

My books have focused on African American and Native American relationships historically, and I think the one that some people may have looked at for this book group meeting is Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds, which is a co-edited collection of chapters and essays that I worked on with a colleague Sharon Holland. Sharon Holland focuses on literature. I focus on history, but we are both really working in the overlapping areas of fields. 

Khadija Hammuda: Hi, my name Khadija. I am in Niagara Ontario, St. Catharines to be specific, which is traditional Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territory. My family stores from North Africa. I immigrated with my immediate family when I was 12 from Libya in North Africa, and I have not written a book, but I am, I feel very blessed and grateful to be in the presence of so many amazing authors and Patty, who is writing a book so I'm very excited for that. The book I read was also All Our Relations by Tanya Talaga. I am very excited to read the other books. I am not as fast a reader as Patty is, and I think last time we talked I asked her how she manages to read so many, but they're all on my to-do, to read list, so I'm very excited to get to them. But I'm very grateful to be in conversation with you all. 

The thing I think that really struck me about Tanya's book, much like Jenessa, I really liked that she talked about indigeneity across the globe and different experiences of Indigenous communities. And it got me thinking about my own context as a settler in Canada, but also in my background because I am, my family's from North Africa, but my family is Arab and Arabs are traced back to the Arabian Peninsula so they also migrated thousands of years ago to North Africa. And so that also got me thinking about the relationship my community has back in Libya with the Indigenous people of North Africa and Amazigh and Tuareg people who are the Indigenous people all across, across North Africa. So that just the introspection about different Indigenous communities across the globe got me thinking about my own context, both currently and my background.

So that was really interesting and I'm looking forward to nice discussion 

Seán Kinsella: Tansi. So I'm Seán. Métis/Irish n’daw.  One of the names that I go by translates to the medicine that light brings. I am Bald Eagle Clan adopted into the Anishinaabe people. My family is originally from sort of Saskatchewan, Alberta and then Northern Ontario.

And my family and extended kin, we're signatures of treaties four, six, and eight. So we span quite a geography there across the prairies at one time. In terms of where I am right now, I'm currently in Tkaronto, so the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe people, Haudenosaunee and Wendat, and I was born here, my family, my grandparents left where they were from.

So my dad's side is Irish, which is where you get Kinsella from. And my mom's family left northern Ontario and then out west at the end of World War II. So both of them served in combat and then came back and settled in Thunder Bay and then eventually moved into Hamilton actually because they were working. My grandfather worked for the Hamilton Spec for a number of years. 

And I read Cheryl's book and I think it really resonated with me in particular the poem, this sort of, this notion of who and where we start history from. So this notion of being in grad school and this idea of trying to write about your people and trying to interrogate that notion and being told on one hand that you're not supposed to do that, that's not the history they're looking for. That's not the history that is interesting or intersectional for folks but eventually is the one they want to hear when it pertains to a particular topic. So I was really struck by that notion of, and in the work that I do, so I work at a college and I work in Indigenous inclusion. It's that every time I'm in a meeting, I'm like, wait, is now the time? Is now the time to talk about the Indigenous stuff? Can I bring it up? Is this the right, is this the right sphere? No. Okay, great. I'm just gonna go back in my lane over there. And then by the time when all of a sudden it's needed, right? So I think that was very much a resonance of my own sort of experience in grad school and then also I think even as a person who's a poet myself, like how much indigeneity, and how much of our nations and languages can we bring in before it becomes too much. Even while we're balancing that with the fact that our histories have been hidden. For myself as a light-skinned sort of Métis and Cree person, the displacement from colonialism has led to me growing up not hearing my languages and being extracted from my community and having to re regain those ceremonies and learn them on this territory, which is the work that I've done.

So I think it was an interesting balance, and I really appreciated a lot of the different sort of resonance in some of the traditional stories and the way it was weaved in with the book. 

Patty Krawec: Thank you, Seán and Cheryl, maybe we could open, you could read the poem. 

Cheryl Savageau: Okay. This poem is called Graduate School First Semester, so here I am writing about Indians again 

It starts with a quote. From Winona LaDuke, “the conquest is not sustainable.”

thanks for bringing that
to our attention
she said the first time
to my response to a history text
about a famous painting
of the Battle of Quebec
that never mentioned the French
and only mentioned Indians twice,
once as nuisances, once
as the noble savage
kneeling by the dying
English general

this was during
the French and Indian war
I said, soon thousands
of French and Indian people
would be displaced, sold
into indentured servitude
my own family among them
there would be bounties
on the heads of Abenaki people
in Maine, and the English
would sow the fields of the Mohawks
with salt

thanks for bringing that up,
she said

the next book mentioned
cannibals in the Caribbean,
Indians who believed the Spanish were
gods, Indians killing themselves, Indian
women in love with Spanish pricks, Indians
whose names, even when known, were
passed over in favor of the ones
given them by the Spanish

stop writing about
Indians
she told me
you’re making everyone
feel guilty

but the next book
was back in Maine
home territory
the diary of a midwife
right after that same
French and Indian war
and she was using herbs
not found in English herbals
and wrote that a “young
squaw” visited her
over a period of
three weeks, but

the famous historian
said only that
there may have been
Indians in the area,
while she wrote
at length about
white men dressing up
as Indians
to protest against the rich
stealing their lands

top writing about Indians
she told me again
only louder as if
I was hard of hearing
you have to allow authors
their subjects, she said
stop writing about
what isn’t in the text

which is just our entire history

this week, she said
I’m really upset
you’re telling the same story
three times
because there’s only
one story about Indians
and we all know what it is
so I asked her if there are an
infinite number of stories about
white people
and she told me to
stop being racist

so I stayed away from class for a week
because they were reading a book
about a mystery in the Everglades
and I knew there had to be
Indians in that swamp
and I didn’t want to have to
write about Indians
again

it was on to the next book
written, she said by
a Cherokee writer,
which Leslie Silko, who is Laguna,
will be interested to find out
because the book was Ceremony
but that is a small mistake
sort of like saying that
Dante is Chinese, so
I overlooked it

now, she told me
write about Indians

and I might have done that
except she went on
about Indians putting on
a mask of whiteness
like white people put on
black face, and some of the students
wrote it down in their notebooks
and everyone started talking about
minstrel shows

then she wanted me to tell her
if there is such a thing as
an Indian world view
and I said, well, yes and no,
which I figured was safe
since I would be at least
half-right whichever answer
she wanted, but when I mentioned
the European world view,
she said there isn’t any such thing
which was quite a relief to me,
I hate to think there were a
whole lot of people thinking in
hierarchies and as if the
earth is a dead object and
animals and plants and some people
not having spirit
then she said I’d better stick
to what I know, that is,
Indians, which is what
I was trying to do in the first place,
and that maybe European philosophy
was too much for my primitive
brain in spite of its being my
undergraduate major
and I pointed out that the
oppressed always know more
about the oppressor than vice
versa, so she just glared at me
and told me that I look
Scandinavian

which was a surprise to me
and I wondered why I never was a
prom queen since it was always the
Scandinavian girls who got that
honor, maybe they never
noticed I was one of them. Exactly
how much Indian are you anyway?
she asked. I told her I guessed
I was pretty much Indian. I
suppose she wondered
why I wouldn’t accept that mask of
whiteness she kept talking about
as myself

Patty Krawec: The story of how I found that poem was, there's a quote by from Sherman Alexi about how when the great American Indian novel is written, all the white people will be Indians and all the Indians will be ghosts. And I really liked that picture. But then everything went sideways and I wanted to quote somebody who wasn't Sherman Alexi to get that point across and somebody, so I just threw it out into the Twitterverse. Then I was looking for something that conveyed that, that kind of conveyed the same idea. And then that was how somebody had sent me a link to a poem by Cheryl, and it really does capture that erasure really well. And there's a line where your teacher says to stop writing what isn't in the text.

And so what I'm wondering, and maybe we'll start with Nick, in the book that you wrote, which actually I read just before Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds, what isn't in the text that you wanted to write about? What isn't? What isn't in the kind of the broad history texts that we all read? What are those gaps that you were trying to fill?

Nick Estes: Yeah, that's actually a really good question. And first of all, I wanna just apologize. I'm like really sick. So I missed the other part of your question that you asked in introductions. I'm from the Lower Sioux tribe. I was born and raised in South Dakota, so I'm a transplant here in Albuquerque right now.

But the question, the, that question is actually really important. 'cause the book itself is in many ways a continuation of a story that began with my grandfather, Frank Estes. And I talk a little bit about it in the prologue to the book called Prophets. But he was one of the grandfathers, I had five grandfathers from Lower Sioux and he was the one grandfather I never grew up around. He also didn't speak Lakota. The rest of my grandfathers were all fluent Lakota speakers and he was the, this kind of mysterious figure. And I met him for the first and last time in Tempe, Arizona around like 2013, and actually interviewed him. And it was right around the time the Department of Interior was doing the land buyback program.

I don't know if people are familiar with that, but essentially. The allotments that were allotted to my family are currently underwater right now. And they sent him this little package and it was funny 'cause they built the dam and they still parcel up the land even though it's like literally underwater to show where our original family allotment was. And so that actually began a kind of longer conversation that he and I had because I grew up with stories with of my grandfather, brown, grandpa Brown or Andrew Estes, as being the kind of leader of the family, the patriarch, but in, not in a weird like Western way. And also my great-grandfather who was a translator, Ruben Estes.He was also the first chairman of the tribe. And so I grew up knowing those stories. But when I talked to my grandpa, Frank, he explained to me that actually it was my grandmother, Cornelia Swalla who was really the matriarch of the family and he filled in all of these stories and history that I just had not considered.

For example, we were in a battle with the federal and state government about the damning of the river. And my grandfather, even though he and my great-grandfather Ruben, even though he spoke English, he couldn't read or 'cause he never went to school. But my grandmother, Cornelia, was sent to boarding school and she learned to read and write. And so she wrote and she wrote all of the foundational documents that led to this larger case against the US government, but then also the founding of the modern kind of tribal council. And that was something that you would never find in the archives.  It would, it was completely erased the fact that all of these powerful church fathers and congressmen, senators were actually talking to a woman. They had no idea. 'cause she was the one that was writing the letters. That was really profound. And going back to the allotment stories, and I wrote about this, I actually wrote an essay that's gonna be published in a book called Allotment Stories that kind of gives a background to that. The things that I couldn't include in the book.

He talks about my grandmother, Cornelia Swalla and talks a lot about how she was a product of a marriage that completely defy Christian norms at the time. It wasn't even really a marriage. It was so like the allotment documents have that, and there was one man who originated from Wanblee, South Dakota. His name is White Calf River and he had taken, I think four wives. He only married one the Christian way. So why that story with my grandpa Frank, was really important is 'cause he had this like paper, but it had all of our, all like allotment relatives. He says we're related to the land, the same land. I was like, wow, that's a really profound thing to say.

And he was like, no, actually, if you look at the paper related to all these strangers, and he was like a sociologist. He was a smart, he was like a trained scientific man. And he was like, he, the way he described it, he was like citing Emil Durkheim and things like that. But basically his theory was that the world of paper in the form of allotments had replaced the world of Indigenous relations. And he was talking about how that really was grounded in the land. And it's not just like a kind of metaphor, it's like a, it's a real relation. And through the stories of the allotment itself he identified like the western way that we relate to land. 'cause we're actually, because of allotments and fractionation, we are related to all these people, but they're like strangers and they're we're basically paper relatives.

And it seemed really bizarre to me, really fascinating. But then he was like, the end of our conversation, he's your cousin, such and such, they're not actually blood related to you because we took them in, we did an adoption ceremony and that's the real like way that we relate to each other. And that was like, that was really profound for me and that stuck with me and it never made it into the book but nonetheless, I had to write a piece afterwards 'cause I was like, this has to be included. 'cause there was, it just didn't really fit with the story that I was trying to write. But I'm sure that in these massive amounts, 'cause the US government, like all colonial governments records its atrocities, records, its crimes and there's all these stories within there that kind of seem dead in many ways when you do the archives.

And so doing that kind of oral history work, especially like brings to light and like brings to bear these kinds of stories that would other otherwise not be told. So that was something that really stuck out to me. And there's more, but I'll just keep it at that. 

Tiya Miles: I wanna start first by thanking Cheryl for that poem.

So powerful. There's a moment in her poem where she's describing a book that was a really important book to me in graduate school, and I used to have this fantasy that I was going to write a whole book about. That moment that you talk about in your poem about the plants and the native woman who's got plans, who's often an African enslaved woman in that same book who's got plants, and there's no discussion of who are these women, what are the plants they're using, what are their relationships?

There's really just a central frame, which is about the white midwife. And the white midwife is a fascinating person. I'm glad that there's a book written about her, but there should also be books about the native woman and about the Black woman, and especially I think about the ways in which they must have been in some kind of relationship because they were both providing that other midwife with her materials and probably with important knowledge.

So that's just a thought I had hearing your fantastic poem. I think that I'm actually gonna try and see if I can play this in my class tomorrow if the recording's up soon enough. Or maybe even just give it a try reading it loud myself. 'cause that was terrific. And I think that example really goes to your question, Patty, about what's missing.

I'll just go back and fill in some context, which is that in college I was a Black studies major, and for me this was an opportunity to find myself, find my ranges, how I felt about it, 18, 19 to understand more about who I was. And I focused all of my attention both in the classroom and out of the classroom on Black cultural analysis and production.

And I think that's all well and good. I think people should be doing that. But it wasn't until probably my junior year, and I am not proud of this, that I realized that Native American history was a history just as powerful and just as filled with atrocities as Nick has just said, as African American history. I didn't realize that. I didn't think about that. I was very focused on one topic, one set of questions, and to keep bringing this circle around. One of the ways that I came to that, not the only way, but one of the ways I came to that was Winona LaDuke coming to my campus and giving a talk. So once I realized, it was like the scales fell off my eyes and there was no, there's really no choice but to try to understand this other history, try to understand these other peoples, try to understand the relationships between and among all these peoples, talking about Black peoples and native peoples, especially in the context of US nation building and colonial history.

So that's the first missing piece for me, Patty. It was, I don't think it should be possible that a student can go through Black studies and never study Native America, never study native people, never study native places. It doesn't make sense because there would be no Black studies in the US if it were not for native peoples, native places, native lands, et cetera.

And African Americans have long known this. There has long been a Black imaginary about native people and about native spaces. And oftentimes that imaginary has been romanticized. It's been overly romanticized. But that doesn't mean that those relationships did not exist. So to me that is very important.

But I will add counterbalancing weight to this, which is that once they started studying Native American studies, and this didn't happen until graduate school, I saw a similar kind of emptiness. That is native history and Native studies was not noticing Black people, was not noticing Black culture, was not noticing Black kin.

And there really is overlap there. And I felt like there was this erasure and this slighting happening going in both directions. And in neither context was it good for anybody. In my view it was only weakening Black people and only weakening native peoples. And I could say more about the book if you'd like, but that's a big part of why I'm doing this, not the whole part.

Some things are personal, but it's a big part of why I'm doing this. And it's a big part of the problem that I've seen and I think that the, that at least partial solutions to some of the real problems that Native peoples and Black contend with have to do with recognizing what we can bring to one another.

Khadija Hammuda: Thank you Patty, and thank you Tiya and Nick and Cheryl. I'm really soaking in all of what you're saying and I really appreciate all your insight. It's interesting that you mention history 'cause I did, as I was reading Tanya's book and also Patty, the article by Raven Sinclair that you sent me, which I read recently, and I had the same thought reading both of them with regards to my work, is that it's a very, it's a very dangerous road to go down in terms of tell, trying to tell a history of an individual or a people's history, right?

Because the narrative can impact the future so much. And it got me thinking about like when I was first training, history was a big thing, right? You get a new file, you have to look to see if a family has history, right? Because the history, so to speak, can predict the future, right? If there is a risk factor pertaining to a child that is apparent in that family's history, you have to ask about it. You have to look for it, you have to dissect it if that risk factor is still there. But as I was reading Tanya's book around how much erasing there is of a people's history and replacing it with the colonial narrative. And I also linked it back to Daniel's book, I just grabbed it 'cause I wanted to look for the quote where he talks about single stories and how single stories are shallow and they avoid complexity and then they open space for manipulation.

And I realized that sometimes the narrative that you can build about a family is written from a child protection lens that is rooted in a colonial understanding of child protection or child welfare that does so much damage that you read the history. And what you're getting is the colonial narrative of that family's history.

And in as that sign came, I realize how dangerous it. To be a part of that. And it really, I actually, I mentioned it at my last team meeting to my supervisor and I said, like just reading it and between Tanya's book and Raven Sinclair's article that Patty sent me that I'm, that I mentioned talking about the sixties scoop. And she said, she quoted a social worker that looked back and said, that was horrible what we did, who was a social worker working in child protection in the sixties. And I told my supervisor, I am so scared of 20 years from now looking back and saying I was a part of that. And that it's just such a, it's such a, like a reality check because you don't realize how deeply rooted you are in the colonial narrative until you're faced with the facts and then you're like, wow.

So it took between Tanya's book and Daniel's book from last month and Raven's article. I'm just, I'm overwhelmed with the amount of, with how much shifting in perspective needs to happen to really see what's wrong with the way we tell stories and with the way colonial narratives of history can impact the people and an individual on so many levels.

Not to get dark. 'cause I was really enjoying everybody's and everybody's insight, but I think working in child welfare and discussing Indigenous relations with the child welfare system is not usually a happy subject. So put a damper on things. 

Patty Krawec: When you were talking about risk assessment, it made me think of when we read the Histories of Canada and the US we could really do a risk assessment on those states and look at the things that they have done.

Because really when we look at the history, the reconstruction period, we're right back in that. We're right back in that place of where Canada and the us, Canadians, Americans, Indigenous,  settlers, Indigenous people, all deciding who we are gonna be. What we're gonna do. That's especially after the insurrection attempt on, on January 6th, really deciding, reconcile with

Nick, in your book, you make a point that Black, Indigenous and Mexican peoples were brought into the US as peoples, not as individuals. Immigrants come to our, come to these countries as individuals, but Black, Indigenous and Mexican peoples were brought in as peoples. Can you unpack that a little bit? 'cause that was really interesting to me.

Nick Estes: That insight actually comes from Vine Deloria’s book. We Talk, You Listen, where he talks about the peoplehood framework. He expands on the theory of like tribalism and how tribalism has always been under attack by the US government, but then how other people have shared collective experiences and specifically thinking about how for Mexican Americans or what became Mexican American, that was an imperialist war, right? About the expansion of slavery into the southwest. Like Texas seceded specifically because Mexico was moving toward moving to abolish chattel slavery. And they declared independence and basically instigated an invasion and conquest of what became the Southwest.

And you brought up something interesting and just to build on what Tiya says and that I read Tiya's book,The Ties that Bind in Grad School, and it was actually the first study that I think took serious these, and I actually, it blew my mind. And I was like, why don't we do, I didn't even know that, I didn't even really know that history. And so I was like, why don't, why isn't this a category of analysis? And I still haven't like fully fleshed out what a lot of that means. I'm doing kind of research on the, on like in the background, trying to think more. But you brought up the 1776, or excuse me, the Capitol protests. Which was characterized by these Trumpists as a 1776 moment.

And I think there's been a lot of sneering and holding one's nose at Trump's 1776 Commission. But the truth of the matter is that there's a deep investment in that kind of narrative, and I think it's worth unpacking, like how native people and Black people are talked about in the Declaration of Independence.

And there's, there was this weird historical debate. I was in a very conservative history program at a small state college and there was this weird historical debate about whether or not in the Declaration of Independence, the, that whether or not Thomas Jefferson meant the slave rebellions when he said domestic insurrections. And it was funny. It was like, how wouldn't it be that? It's if we think about it in that context, I know the original question was about thinking about how these three groups were brought in as peoples instead of individuals. But I think centering our history and our historical analysis on looking, like provincializing the United States.

The United States, wasn't inevitable.  1776 was an important watershed moment in what I think Gerald Ford correctly assesses the situation as a counter-revolution. Later on. WEB Du Bois would talk about the counter-revolution of property and reconstruction. But I would say that it was a counter-revolution, not just for African people who were brought here, but it was also a counter-revolution for native people who overwhelmingly near universally sided with the British, not because they felt like the British were better colonizers, but they understood the threat of the American project from the very get go.

And so from the beginning, we are categorized as, yeah, merciless Indian savages, but we're categorized as traitorous people, both African and native people to this land. To me that's a very fascinating history because I think so much unfolds after that. The secessionists in, at the beginning of the Civil War actually cited 1776 as well, and they were honoring that kind of spirit.

And it's obviously like a racial project. It's a racial grievance. This country was founded on racial events to continue the kind of property regimes that were put in place, whether it was through plantation slavery or through westward expansion. You can't only look at one and not the other 'cause they're integrated. And also it implicates both, it's not these pure subjects of history like native people, as Tiya has eloquent, eloquently documented, both those books that are very beautiful, The House on Diamond Hill and The Ties that Bind. The Native people to like to enact some kind of recognition or legitimation in the settler state began to participate in those processes as well.

You brought up child removal. Henry Pratt got his idea for the boarding school system through the integration of units on the western frontier. When he was leading the Freedman armies against, or the Buffalo soldiers against Indian people, but also employing the use of scouts as well. He is like, why has one people granted citizenship and not the other?

And he actually cites natal alienation as the fundamental key for subjugating Black people in this country. And he's, we have to do that with Indigenous people by removing them from their family. He like says this explicitly. And so there like Tiya says, I think there are more connections when looking at specifically child removal and the foster care system that came out of it. This was something that there was cross pollination in the, in those projects. And so I think you can't talk about one without the other. Not to say nothing of the category of Mexican American and how that all came about as well. It's an incredibly thing, important thing. 

Patty Krawec: Jen, I'm gonna shoot another question at Tiya and then go back to Cheryl.

In the preface of your book, you talk about, because you're talking about Black and Indigenous relationships, but that invisible third partner, which Cheryl's poem makes very visible that we're, that we are seen only in the gaps of the white story. So can you talk a little bit about that invisible third partner, because that's, I think Nick was also mentioning with Pratt and what they were doing in the military is that we had all of these relationships, but whiteness was always present and that and then in Cheryl's poem she's showing how the how in that way, whiteness becomes the dominant story even in our own relationships. 

Tiya Miles: So that's the problem that I found in doing this research. I wanna come back to what you said, Patty, but I need to wind my way to it. Part the problem that I found in my research is both African American history and Native American being narrated in the mainstream academy, the mainstream academy as binary histories in which there were only two major players, and those players were always the group of color, or the Indigenous people and whites, the US nation, or before it, the European colonies. So these narratives were centered around a binary on, on, on both sides and both arenas, which made it very difficult to realize that there were relationships and intricate ones and deep ones that moved between these two locations, between these two zones.

So the binary area is a false setup, which absolutely obfuscates the reality of the complexity of those relationships. In terms of the triangle, I realized this through an experience on the ground that I describe in the preface to this book and the experience was that I worked with some friends and colleagues, one of those being Celia Naylor, who is an African American woman from the Caribbean, who also studies Cherokee and Black history. We, we worked to co organize the conference at Dartmouth College, what feels now, like a very long time ago, in 2000, and it was a conference on Black and native histories and literature. And the big final event of this conference was featuring a discussion by some very prominent people in the field. One of these people was a famous, accomplished, well-known scholar of the Indigenous Southeast, and the person deserves all those accolades, but this person gave a presentation which was about Cherokee people and Black people. And then the person had to leave to catch a plane and after the person left, a Cherokee man and a woman who would be read phenotypically and as Black, but who was saying she was Cherokee, got into a screaming fight. A screaming fight where the Cherokee man was telling her, you are not Cherokee. And she was insisting, I am Cherokee. And he was screaming. We did not enslave our own. It was really painful. It was a scene in terms of nobody knew what to do. It was totally unexpected. People were crying and people were screaming. 

And at the time, as one of the conference organizers and somebody who was still in graduate school and quite young, and this was the first thing that I had worked on to bring people together and around these questions, I thought, oh my goodness our gathering is ruined. It's a disaster. It's over. The point of this, the spirit of this was to bring together scholars, artists from across identities and from across these fields and have a conversation and to show and reveal really how long, deep, rich, and complex these histories and literatures and cultural formations are and the last session is a screaming fight between a Cherokee man and a woman who was saying she's native, but who was being told she that she's not because she looks Black. Thought it was a total failure. In that moment. It was so hard and that I thought about it and thought about it and the result of the thinking about it.

I ended up writing in this book that appeared a handful of years later because what I had missed in as sensing the damage was the white woman who had made the remarks about Cherokee slavery and then left. What we were left with in that room was the native man and the Afro native woman who was being told she wasn't native in a knock, a knockout, dragged out, or what is it? Is it knock down, drag out, fight with one another? And here I'm just extrapolating, I'm turning into a larger symbolic story, what really was 'cause individuals who were involved in it in a conference. But what it looked to me like was a triangle. It wasn't just the dyad that it had seemed to be.

It was a triangle that the corner in that triangle, that represented the whiteness, that represented a history of imposed authority and imposed control and imposed the erasure. It's an imposition of how the peoples were to relate to one another. And back to Nick was saying about allotment, that whole aspect of the triangle had been rendered invisible, as if it was non-existent and it just looked like. Native people and Black people or Afro- native people, not native people screaming at one another, fighting at one another, over a reason that really was no longer so apparent because the reason had left and gone out the door. So for me, once I process, it's still hard to think about that moment. It was hard on, on probably everybody there. But for me that has been a lesson that I had to carry with me from that moment, which is that we need to try to see all of the players. We need to try to see all of the positions and the ways in which they interrelate. And I know the triangle simplifies it. I know that it's probably a, it's a much more complex geometric shape that I don't even know to call.

But it at least helps us to see more of that context, which is always, that plan maybe wasn't at some point, maybe I [...] is right. And the way he puts it. African peoples came to the Americas before Europeans. Maybe they just, peoples went from the Americas to Africa. I don't know that we have evidence for that. But who knows Anything is possible, right? So perhaps there is a prehistory. There is a time before academic historians started writing about the thing when we weren't within this structuring framework of colonialism and settler colonialism and the empire and racialization and slavery and all that. But it's very difficult to get at that.

And right now I think that we are living with and trying to think through and trying to see through the fallout of that framework.  It's really difficult. 

Patty Krawec:Cheryl, what does poetry offer us in terms of responding to or thinking about those frameworks? 'cause poetry is a really another, we've got books, we've got essays, so poetry's really another way of getting at that.

Cheryl Savageau: Certainly because we're working with, primarily with images that we can juxtapose in certain ways, and we're using a storyteller's voice where we’re engaging emotions in a way that, that history often doesn't, that academic essays often doesn't often. I think that's one of the big, is the big things for me, and I know that when I'm writing or telling the story, I don't wanna be didactic. I don't want to do that. I want to tell the story in a way that brings the audience into, the listener into that place with me so that they can feel it with me. I want to, when I'm writing, I always think of the reader as the best, the sort of the best person, like a person of integrity and goodwill.

That's the person I'm writing to. I don't think it, it's, for me, it doesn't work to just, I might be angry, but it doesn't work to just inflict anger on people because nothing's gonna happen. But if I tell the story in a way. That appeals to them because they are a person of goodwill, then I'm hoping they will hear it.

And I do that with images and I do that as much as possible with a storytelling voice. The other thing I think that can happen is that thing of putting in a bigger context, you were saying symbolic Tiya, I'm thinking mythic sometimes. It's like you, you bring in a mythic level in poetry that sometimes, and I think that can be really useful also.

And just the way you're working with a particular rhythm of the words to be able to make a music of it? I think that also somehow has something to do with it. But when I was writing this, that particular poem and this book, I wanted to write it so that every single poem could be footnoted. That was my initial intention.

And the footnotes could be historical. I worked from Jesuit relations and I worked, but I also worked from Cronon’s book about the land. What's the name of it? I forget the name of it now, but the changes. Oh, Changes in the Land. But I also worked from people's letters, I worked from field guides and I worked from the land. Those were the archive I was drawing from. So I felt that I was doing history in a way, but it was more that I'm doing stories, I'm telling stories, and I'm telling stories that work together and somehow to fill in the gaps, if that makes any sense. 

Patty Krawec: Yes. Thank you. Seán, you're also an artist and a poet and a storyteller.

What? What are you thinking? I see it. You keep smiling and nodding so I know what you're thinking. 

Seán Carson: I've been really, there's so much richness in this conversation, so I'm gonna bounce around a little bit. So I was thinking about that notion of traitorous people is something that's resonating with me, and particularly coming from a Cree Métis perspective, because in a lot of ways we're still considered traitorous people in the sense of that, that there's a very visceral line that was drawn at a particular date that led a lot of us to go into hiding. But I'm also approaching it, I think this notion of complexity. So thinking about, as an example, both in current urban environments, but then also like Mi'kmaki and other places where there's this long standing kinship connection between historical Black communities and Indigenous communities that live side by side and are integrated and that sort of the pyramid piece is really sitting with me around like just what happens when whiteness gets parachuted in and completely erodes those relationships or literally pits people against each other, which in our communities with the lateral violence and the ways that we end up having these conversations around identity, that again, limit the complexity.

And so I think it's like the thing that I was thinking about, and I think it's really present in your work, Cheryl, is the thing that in history that's missing to me to some extent, is the humor. 'cause your poem's very funny. There's, it's, and a lot of our historical, I think that's, to me, a piece that is often missing from the histories that we talk about is that a lot of our histories are very funny and there's a lot of humor in the way that we have survived with one another and in those kinship stories that, that I think often gets lost because of the seriousness that, that colonialism pushes us into. And then I think particularly as a, as like a, oh, a queer person, a two-spirit person, I also think about how that intersects with these notions of history and erasure and those, that sort of single story lack of complexity pieces.

Because it also, even when we talk about the allotments or for people, for Métis people, the script program and those other, and Indian acts and all of those things in Canada, that again, it was about reducing complexity and creating the single story of cis men and cis men having dominance over everyone else  imposed. And the erasure that we existed in communities in the first place, which is something we're still fighting back to prove that we exist even though we've existed for as long as our peoples have with our own languages and our own ways of describing ourselves. So I think as a poet, those are also things that I'm trying to capture these very complex thoughts and principles and turning them into images.

And I think, not necessarily spelling them out, but I, one thing that I, another poem that I really liked that was in the collection was, I think it was about, oh, it was a game bag. And it was about that, I think, and it, that's a, that's an example of those sort of humor pieces where there's these very funny things that are oxyconic or legends and beings that live in our legends, that they do these mistakes that they make that are catastrophic to the earth, like accidentally flooding the earth because they have a grudge with an animal or something like that.

I was thinking about some of those, when we go far enough back and we have those oral histories that again, that's a way that we all relate and was an erasure of that complexity and our history is getting shut down. Those are some of the things I was thinking about as folks were talking. 

Tiya Miles: I love the way that the threads of poetry and the history are coming together and the social work and social services piece as well.

The point about how individuals to raise, especially for a child of their past can profoundly affect their future. I wrote that down, and of course that resonates with Nick's ideas, so I just love how this is all coming together and connecting up. 

Nick Estes: Yeah, no I agree. I was actually like thinking about, as Cheryl and Seán were talking, a piece that I wrote about hasn't published yet, but it's an essay I've been working on about poetry, and I'm not a poet at all, but I like poetry. 'cause it's like each line is like what I would call a detonator sentence. Not like in a violent way, not like explosive, but it brings together meanings, feelings, all kind like a complex kind of archive that we simply, I can't really do. I can't really, I don't have that skill and talent. But I was thinking about how I wrote this reflection piece on the George Floyd uprisings and how a hundred miles from where they took place in, in Minneapolis, this Indian trader, Andrew Myrick, told a group of my ancestors starving Lakota people that if they're hungry, let them eat grass.

And as the uprising took place, they found Andrew Myrick in his trade home or in his trading house, chased him, gunned him down as he ran away, decapitated him, and then stuck grass in his mouth. And this line sticks out for me, from Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier, and she wrote, I'm inclined to call this act by the Dakota Warriors a poem.

And there was this question that whether or not poems are always textual. And I think the burning of the third precinct as a poem too, that encapsulates the kind of feeling and anger that simply like saying things like the Black Lives Matter doesn't really capture or resonate, but it shows that like whiteness as property burns. And it can burn too. It can it has it. It's not immortal, it's not invioable. So that was one thing I was just thinking about. Some poems are composed without words and I don't know, as like even a scholar or a writer, how to capture some things the way that poets can do it and who is a poet. And that was just something that came to my mind as I was listening to Michelle and Seán talk.

Patty Krawec: Indigeneity is in the news again. We've got Michelle Latimer. We've got that pretendian list that's getting some attention in the states. And then this tweet came across my feed and I've been really captured by it and I want to get everybody's thoughts on it. It's a Sámi academic and he wrote, “Indigenous is not an identity, it's an analytic, which means it describes the relationship between two or more data sets. It says Mi'kmaq is an identity. Lakota is an identity. African American is an identity. Canadian is an identity, but Indigenous describes a set of relationships to colonialism, anti-colonialism, and specific lands and places. And then Kim TallBear responds saying that identity is a poor substitute for relations and is used as a weapon to displace relations.

As Black and Indigenous people, when we're telling history and writing about history, how does our analysis. Help us to understand, help us to understand these relationships better if the this, these connections that we have between Indigenous and colonialism and land and place and as displanted people on Indigenous land. How these, 'cause we got these pretendians running around, laying claim to relationships that aren't theirs and or Rachel Dolezal's and others as well laying claim to what are really relationships and how so how does our analysis of history, maybe I'm trying to shoehorn things together that don't fit.

I dunno, I can't stop thinking about that. Anybody wanna jump on that? If I made any sense? 

Cheryl Savageau: Indigenous seems like such a, it's one of those words seems like a big compartment. You shove everything into, because I'm Abenaki, I'm Indigenous. My people, my father’s people are from here. What does that mean? I'm Indigenous. That's relationship. As an Abanaki person, my connection is to the land and to my kinship relations. But I think the Indigenous, the word Indigenous to say it's an identity or not an identity or relations are not relations. I think it's just this made up compartment that they threw everything in 'cause they couldn't use the word Native American anymore. In my father's time it just said Indian. We're Indian and what kind of Indian are we? I have a poem. What kind of Indian are we? 

When I was probably six years old and they're hearing the word Abenaki for the first time. What they call us from out there or what scholars call us. Is that our identity? I don't think it is. I think for me it all has to do with who's my family, who's my kin? What are those relationships, what's my relationship to the land in regards to all that? So yes, it's based on relationships, but then to like somehow. Put that into some kind of theoretical thing where it's, again, it's this binary, it's either this or that makes no sense to me. I don't think it, for me, it doesn't, further the conversation, it doesn't help my communities. That's not really useful to them. Those aren't this conversations, I think that, that need to happen. In terms of, I know there's this pretendian thing going on, and I think that certainly there are people who are doing that, but I think there's also people who are making a reputation for themselves, going after people and blowing things outta proportion as well.

So I think that whole thing is, it's a tinder box and it's not useful to some of our communities. That's my 2 cents on it. 

Tiya Miles: So I'll add a one and a half cents to what Cheryl just said. I agree with that assessment, at least what I took you to be saying, Cheryl, about. It's not necessarily so helpful to take language and try to make it rigid. Again, we can recognize that none of these terms can be precise or available in every circumstance. And Indigenous it is very large. It's baggy. I think that it can be helpful because it does have that stretch to it, and that can be helpful for talking about global situations and transnational relationships, but it makes the most sense for people to use the terms that best describe them and their relationships, and it's possible to do both.

It's possible to use very specific terms and also general terms and to move back and forth between them. On the issue of the pretendian list, I have not seen this list. I have heard about this list. I don't think that I have a right to speak about this issue, but I will just say that it makes me feel very uncomfortable, the whole thing, and I've heard about it from the different sides.I think there's very good reason for people to be protective. And I also think that history tells us that people have built relationships across these lines. They have often not been blood relationships. I think history tells us that the kinds of documentation that we rely on through government records or ancestry.com are not gonna capture the full picture of these histories. It is a landmine. There's a lot at stake in it, and I think that it's a very sensitive area. 

Patty Krawec: I'm thinking more about how when we control our, what we tell our histories, the way you guys are doing, and then the kind of the books that you're writing and the other books that we've pulled together, how that, how that informs the way we think about these things, because then it's not whiteness telling the story. We're telling our own stories, our own relationships, and recognizing. Recognizing these complicated relationships that we have with each other, and it tells it, it creates a much different picture. I think about who we are as peoples and about who we are becoming. 

That's something that David Truer talks about in his book, is that new things are emerging. We're not the same peoples we were 5,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago, or even 500 years ago. We're not the same. We're, we can take, we carry that within us, but we're emerging into something new. 

Nick, at the end of your book, you talk a little bit about relation, about kinship relationship as maybe as a source of possibility. Can you talk, expand a little bit about that?

Nick Estes: Yeah. I think what everyone has said about Indigenousness or just to summarize, Indigenousness, the way I understand, it's fundamentally a way of relating that cannot be captured by some of the, I think we've done a good job at breaking down the binary kind of forms of history, but also how the way that like identity is positioned in a hierarchical manner.

And I would agree. I don't know so much about an analytic, I was thinking about that. I think the indigeneity like is more about, I think what Kim is more about relations and it's hard to capture that. And even in the South, I do a lot of, I have a lot of friends who are from various South American countries and communities and they've, a lot of them have abandoned, the word Indigenous. It has a very different connotation in Spanish than it does in English and in Spanish it's almost a negative connotation. And so they've begun to adopt the term the original people, which I find interesting. It's a way to think about that. 

But nonetheless I would say that like why it's important to think about what other groups are doing and communities are doing is that they've really advanced what would be called like the rights of nature movement. And it doesn't really quite fit with kind of the liberal framework of granting like individual's rights. And therefore you're gonna grant like something that isn't categorically human rights. But in fact there is complete misunderstanding and a failure to actually study what these Indigenous people and also non-Indigenous people, like the African descendant movements in these countries are doing to rethink, like radically rethink the idea of liberal democracy as a complete failure and unable to actually account for what they would call plural nationalism or a multi side doesn't even really translate very well.

But it's understanding that individuals are not equal, right? And that civilizations are not equal. And the best that we can hope for is to create some kind of democracy or some kind of form of government that we can agree on not as individuals, not as individual rights bearing subjects, but moving away from the liberal democratic norms and thinking about groups of people as holding those collectives. And then it's, of course, it's expanded to actually think about the natural world itself and how it, it has to have representation and that it's like in flux. 

It's not like a perfect thing, but frankly I don't see any kind of movement like in the States or in Canada or the US at least at kind the settler state level moving towards that. They're so obsessed with it. The cult around the constitution and the cult around the liberal individual that has been incredibly destructive. And it actually, prevents us from, I think making those kinds of relations and that, that's how I would say like something like water protectors a really fascinating identity because it's not specific to just Indigenous people, like non-Indigenous people or other people can inhabit that identity. That caretaking role. And I think that's a much more capacious way of viewing Audi as it relates to how we understand decolonization, which might be different from like a Marxist sense and understanding a classless society. We're not trying to eliminate nativeness or indigeneity or Africanness or Black culture, or actually a decolonization means an amplification of those ways of life.

And the, I would call it a simple settler onticide, which doesn't mean the actual like killing of settler people, but like a cultural, legal, social kind of, what would you call it? De privileging or de platforming of that, that as the dominant way of relating. 'cause settler relations are fundamentally based on property and we have alternatives.

And so that, that's my vision of decolonization is the amplification of those life worlds. That's what I, that's what I think means. And Indigenous people, I think Emily Riddle said it really well, put it really eloquently. I don't have the quote in front of me. She says, Western notions of sovereignty are based on exclusion, whereas Indigenous notions of sovereignty are based on like plurality and overlapping differences.

Our strength comes from difference. It doesn't come from uniformity or exclusion. So I thought that was a really good way of putting it to show that Indigenous people have always negotiated kind of different peoples, including non-Indigenous people. And there's a political tradition there that is, I think, very capacious.

And I think given the opportunity to thrive it, it provides a model that isn't just something that's categorically Indigenous, but that can go beyond that parochial vision of, oh, that's an Indigenous issue over here. Let's not think about it. 

Cheryl Savageau: Lisa Brooks has a book called The Common Pot, in which she talks about the very different kind of economic system that we have here, and that we actually invited the original settlers to join us in, which they did not, would not.

So for me, I don't see the democracy part of it as being as much of a problem as I see the capitalist model, the model that there are haves and there are have nots, and the whole way that's been playing out here. I think that's a great problem. And the other thing is just the white supremacy that is, has been the underbelly of America from the very beginning.

So I don't wanna throw out the part of what's going on in America that actually includes people, which is, it seems to me the democratic voting part. What I'd like to get rid of is the capitalism and the racism. That would be good. 

Patty Krawec: I'm with you. We'll get rid of that part of it. So I'm being here in Niagara, Seán and Khadija are also like, we're here in Southern Ontario and it's the Dish with One Spoon area, which is a treaty between the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples.

And then, so Tiya, when I was reading your book. You talked about the one chapter about eating out of the same pot, and I just thought that was, because that's the picture that I hear all the time around here is that's the dish with one spoon is this area is one dish and we're going to share the resources and eat together. So can you just talk a little bit about that and then we'll get to wrapping things up? 

Tiya Miles: Sure. That's a quote that I found in really an old literature about Black and native relations, and it's a quote that comes out of oral history, which takes us back to a point that was made earlier in our conversation.

And that is much of the material that, that we need to actually see and recognize and think about those alternatives. It exists in oral history, it exists in oral tradition, exists in poetry. It doesn't necessarily exist in the written archive. And if we only look at written materials, we will miss it. I do think we must also look at materials and I was really excited to hear you talk about that, Cheryl, about the ways in which you bring in archival materials in your research and inspiration for writing poetry.

But that quote is really about common life, about coming together to support life. And I think it's one of the visions that we have to take forward. No, I really don't wanna add on a negative note, so I hesitate to say this, but I am going to say that Nick's comment about, I think he was, I think he used the language of the cult of the Constitution was very interesting to me.

I don't know, I can't remember if he said the cult of the Declaration of Independence as well and put those together. But yes, if we go back to those founding documents, we see a lot of problems. Okay. We see a lot of problems and the ways in which native people and Black people are represented. And of course there is that very important central third actor who is attempting to do the orchestration and attempting to impose on these populations of Black and native people. 

What does it mean in this moment that we are really having to turn back to this language of the Constitution to try to put up a defense against things like the capital insurrection. So what I'm saying is these founding documents are problematic. We know this. Yes, there are some good ideas in the mix as well. We, I think we need to acknowledge that, but they're deeply problematic and they are constructed in a way as to marginalize, control, exploit native people and Black people and native land, though often in different kinds of ways.

And yet I have felt that in this moment. I have just been begging somebody, please, let's pay attention to the constitution. Let's try to abide by some of these laws that are supposedly so important to this country so that things can hold together. Let's not let a bunch of people carrying weapons and a confederate flag tear apart whatever it is that we have of a democracy.

It's, to me, the, there's a tension there in what it is that we're discussing. We have alternatives. We need alternatives, and yet I feel like we're just barely trying to hold onto some kinds of, some kind of semblance of democracy. 

Patty Krawec: Just by way of wrapping up, Seán had just posted a really good comment, and I'm gonna switch up the question I was gonna ask everybody at the end to reflect on what Seán has.

So Seán's comment is, he's thinking about the comment, the concepts. Wahkohtowin and kinship, what it means to be a good relative. So I'm just gonna ask as we go around for our final thoughts shaping around that and Seán, I, your comment, so we'll start with you also, it's your Cree words, so we'll let you unpack that because that is that relationality and what it means to be a good relative and what history can, our reflections on history as we read it, as we research it, as we write it.

It says a lot about relationality and being relatives and not I, we talked with Daniel Heath Justice yesterday about his new book Raccoon and we can be a relationship with other than human relatives and human relatives. We don't have to like them, but we can still bein relationship with them and I respect their space and respect those overlapping borderlands that we live in because we, sometimes there are those old, the borders aren’t fixed, right? There're often very overlapping. We'll go around with whatever final thoughts that you have, but just in, in the context of what it means to be a good relative. So we'll start with you. 

Seán Carson: Yeah, and I think I was thinking about that we are in relation to one another, like we don't have to like our relatives, but we are like, that is a fundamental reality of what it means to be human and related to each other because we are all related, which I know is that often gets used as like a catchphrase or slogan, but I think it, it's, the fundamental truth is that we, what makes us different is that relationship we have to each other as human and to the sort of like beyond human world and to spirit and like all of that stuff that layers on top of each other that becomes very complex.

And I think in referring back to the earlier question around the sort of pretendian thing, I think the real question to me, because people are always going to claim identities whether they belong to them or not, because that's part of capitalism and consumption. But the question then comes to me for those folks is what have you done for our communities then if you're gonna claim kinship with us.

What have you done for our communities to make it better? What have you done to make our communities better? What have you done? Because we had systems of integrating people, and we've had those for thousands of years, right? That's what adoptions are for. That's what marriages were for. That's what a lot of those were for, was these notions of creating relatives with one another.

So that's what I think about. And for each nation, that's probably gonna be a little bit different because what it means to be a good relative is related to our language and our own sort of like worldview and concepts. But for me, I think it is about what responsibilities do we have to one another to make our time here a little bit better?

So that's how I would frame that. So that's a question to ask. I think anyone, but especially folks who are claiming kinship to us is okay. If you're claiming to be Cree, then what are you doing for Cree people? What are you doing to help each other?

Nick Estes: Yeah. This, I guess one of my mentors framed it best, and I think we can go up relations as a spatial thing, but also what I try to do in my book is think about it as a temporal framing as well. Deloria once said that like he, he coined, or I guess elaborated on the idea of seven generations, and I think people use it in different ways, but the way that he framed it is very much like a Lakota way of, or a Dakota way of thinking about it.

For some communities, not all of them, but seven generations is one would be considered a a lucky person or a fortunate person if they met their great grandparents, their grandparents, their parents, three generations back, and then got to meet their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

And that's six three generations forward. So that's six generations and they represent the seventh generation. And I always thought that was a good way to think about it because also another, like one of my mentors actually told me she was, she said, you don't even own your own life. You are here to ensure that we will have generations of people to come as Dakota or Lakota people and I think some, it might, it's not like fatalistic or anything like that, but it is very much a future oriented thing. And to see oneself as being a good ancestor for the future generations is something that we aspire to be on the here and now. And I think that's something that I was thinking about we've talked a lot about kind of the relationality to different groups of people about it's human and otherwise, but I also think about that in a temporal aspect as well. That this, that Indigenous people have always been a future oriented people. And that's what that kind of notion of being a good relative for me at least, comes from this kind of idea of being a good ancestor to the future.

Patty Krawec: Thank you, Cheryl? 

Cheryl Savageau: I agree so much with what you just said, and also Seán, that it has to be relationship. As soon as you say the word relationship, for me, what it means is that. There's responsibility between the two people who are in the relationship that I, and I wanna say that's true in the other than human world as well.

That we are in that relationship, whether we wanna be in a relationship or not, we actually are. So it's up to us then to take responsibility for that and acknowledge that it's a kinship. And I think being the good ancestor, being the good relative is really about that. But how do I act in right relationship with how do I give back to the green plants that are making the oxygen that I breathe, that are feeding me, that are feeding everything on the planet?

For example, it's, if you're living in a, in that place where you acknowledge that you are living because of the gifts of other beings, then you are going to be in a different relationship to them. And I think that's. For me, it's always like looking for that. What is that? Where's the balance and reciprocity happening?

What is my responsibility here? And I, so I think it, you were talking about going temporally, so I'm thinking that a little bit as a vertical and the horizontal cosmology also, which reaches out toward everything in the world. First, our immediate families and maybe human community, but to the non-human community as well.

Patty Krawec: Thank you, Cheryl. Khadija?

Khadija Hammuda: This has been very eye-opening for me and I really appreciate everybody's insights. I think that it also sparked in me my ongoing identity crisis. And to answer your question, I think when I think about being a good relative is just grappling with my context here because my. As an immigrant, I'm here through the colonial state and my family immigrated after my dad was chased out of Libya due to political unrest and suppression from the Libyan government.

And so my father left Libya and was basically just roaming several different countries and then ended up in Canada as a refugee. And then two or three years later, the rest of my family joined him. And so my understanding of Canada that shaped me as a child was this place that reunited my family, that gave us a home when our own home didn't want us.

And so I grew up with this idea of Canada as a saving grace. And as I've grown older and understood Canada's relationship with Indigenous peoples as a colonial state I grapple with those two sides of me and how to be a good relative to the Indigenous people of the land. When I was brought here and my existence here was legitimized through the colonial state.

And as everybody was talking, I that, a lot of that came up for me. And I think that Tiya, to your point, I think it's, for me, being a good relative is always assessing how whiteness and the white supremacist state is present in my, in the way. I understand my own identity and relationship with other nations on Turtle Island and recognizing that and always interrogating the ways in which my presence as a settler legitimizes the colonial state and silences the narrative of Indigenous communities.

And so it's an ongoing, it's an ongoing process, I think, to be a good relative. And I think the other thing that I wanted to mention in terms of what NIck said when you sent deplatforming that the colonial narrative, I thought. Tanya's book because she weaves in all these little details about traditions of different communities throughout the discussion about very heavy topics.

And in one part she talked about the tradition, and I can't remember the tradition of which, which nation, and I wrote it down, but I have too many notes so I won't try to look for it. But in, in a specific Indigenous nation where there's a ceremony for a child when they start walking, that their feet don't touch the ground until they start walking.

And I'm listening to the audio book in my car. And then when that came on, I got really excited because in Libya we have this tradition of when a child starts walking there, you get a little like wool rope and you tie it around, the child's like ankles, and then another child cuts it, and that's a celebration of the child beginning to walk and the child takes their first step.

And so that was a moment that I was just really excited because being away from my community, that's something that I had forgotten about. And then when she mentioned that, I was like, oh, wow, I remember that in Libya. So as we were talking about de platforming the colonial narrative and understanding how they're present, I just realized that it was like these little moments where And lastly, I think just based on what I read from you Patty about being a good relative is being a good intern.

And so that's really stuck with me since I read your twitter thread at some point about being a good intern. And I think that's something that I'm always hoping to amplify and always hoping to do, is to just be an intern and learn so that I can be a good relative. And in turn. Like an extent, be a good ancestor.

And thank you. I also wanna just thank everybody for this space, for your knowledge, for your insight. It's been absolutely a phenomenal conversation. 

Patty Krawec: Thanks Khadija. Yes. I've been going off on Twitter about we need interns, not allies. 

Khadija Hammuda: I absolutely love that. 

Patty Krawec: Yeah. And I think in different capacities, I also act as an intern with the queer and two-Spirit communities, there's a lot that I don't know. And so I spend a lot of time learning as opposed to trying and help. So it's about learning and then doing that, doing those tasks, and maybe bringing coffee if that's necessary. Tiya, I’ll give you the last word.

Tiya Miles: You all are such wordsmiths. You have said so many things that, that I'm so glad this is being recorded because I wanna remember what it is that you've said. I really can't add to what has been said. I agree with what has been said. About relationship already being in place. We couldn't avoid it if we wanted to.

We couldn't untangle it if we wanted to. And that is about both the good and the bad. And let me just say here that we are all in a relationship to whiteness. Many of us have white ancestry, many of us have white relatives, and so there's no way to slice off whiteness just as we can't slice off Blackness and we can't slice off indigeneity in this conversation.

I think what we want to do is try to understand how it is that we can get closer to healing, try to understand how we would relate to one another, if we could look closely at these alternatives, recognize them, and try to dream and act them into being. I completely agree with what has been said about responsibility. About beings who are not human as being a part of that picture. And I guess I'll just say that I love words. I feel like we can talk a good game, right? We can say it's so important that we're relatives and we need to be responsible. We need to be reciprocal. We need to listen. But when we are faced with those choices and how to be with people, or how to be with beings who are not human, what do we choose?

For me, that's what I'm leaving this conversation with, wanting to take all of these wonderful words and ideas about relatedness, about being relatives into my tomorrow and into the way that I choose to respond to somebody or to act in relation to somebody.

Patty Krawec: Thank you for listening. You can find me online at thousandworlds.ca where I write about traditional Ojibwe stories and how they connect with our career lives, along with the books that I'm reading or feel relevant to the story. This podcast series and the book that emerged from it changed me the way that good books and the conversations about them do.

Remember the first rule of Bad Indians Book Club: Always Carry A Book. 

These conversations originally streamed live and were recorded in 2021. Editing and transcripts completed by Tiffany Hill With the generous support of Dr. Eve Tuck, director of the Visiting Lab at Lenapehoking. Our theme is biindigan, an original hand drum song composed and performed by Nicole Joy Fraser.

Baamaapii!

Excerpt from Booklist, a starred review which means the book is "outstanding in its genre": A fascinating advanced seminar about how to think, read, think about reading, and think about Indigenous lives.”

Get your copy of Bad Indians Book Club today in the US at Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and in Canada: Indigenous owned GoodMinds, as well as Amazon, indie books, and Chapters Indigo. Get it wherever you get your books.

And if you want me to zoom into your local bookstore or bookclub? Talk with you on your podcast? I can do that. patty.krawec@gmail.com For larger professional settings you can email Rob Firing at rob@transatlanticagency.com

And I've got some launch events! Click the link to register. Registration isn't open for all events yet, if you are in the area you can save the date and a link will be added when it's available.

October 2, 7pm in Vancouver British Columbia: Indigenous Geographies with Dr. Deondre Smiles at Massy Books.

October 28, 6:30-8pm at the Peterborough Library in Peterborough Ontario.

October 29: 7:00-8:30pm at the Tweed Library in Tweed Ontario

November 17, 7:00 pm Burlington Lit Fest in Burlington Ontario.

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