Mashkiki: Part 1

Bad Indians Book Club has two epigraphs, one of which is: "It's not about the land and it never has been. It's about how you arrive and build a relationship with the land you are on. And once you're there it's about how you receive others." Natalie Diaz is a Mojave/Akimel O'odam poet living in Arizona, she was interviewed for the book We Are The Middle of Forever, a collection of interviews on the climate crisis and what a future could look like. The title comes from a spoken word piece by John Trudell in which he is talking to his little daughter.

I had the pleasure of sharing space with Diaz in May 2024 at the opening for a photography exhibit at the Carnegie Mellon Art Gallery in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. It was called Widening the Lens and featured the photography of marginalized photographers. My contribution was an essay for the book of the same name that I co-wrote with my son Ben, who you'll hear in this podcast conversation. Diaz and Saretta Morgan read their poetry while people walked through the exhibit, a kind of nature walk meant to reflect what Ben and I would have done outside the next day had we not been rained out and forced to pivot to a slide show.

It was an odd kind of thing to be in that place, the names of robber barons surrounding us while we considered the ways in which we all enter the land, and the consequences of some forms of entry which land hardest on those made marginal by these capitalist structures. These colonial states like to talk about being nations of immigrants and welcoming those in need, but long before the contemporary anti-immigrant rhetoric it was never more than words. There have always been some who were welcomed and others who were turned away and then as now, it generally had to do with politics or race. Immigration is, after all, a nation-building exercise and these European (north and west) nations wanted those who would participate in or uphold this project. So these are nations made of a very particular kind of immigrant, kinds whose welcome waxes and wanes according to the needs of the state.

You may think that is all very reasonable, and it might be, but it forces us to think about the nature of the nation being built which brings us back to the epigraph. It's not blood and it never has been. It's about how you enter the land and build relationships. Then it's about how you welcome others. We, the original people of this place, have never been pure or had fixed borders. All of our stories contain movement and the friction that comes with that. Instead of borders we had areas of influence, centres of culture and belief which radiated outwards and then layered with others .. the stories changing as needed because the people are more important than clinging to terminal creeds born in another place. And our stories also contain adoption and inclusion along with wonderful examples of trans-national solidarities all of which transcend a purely human sensibility. We must all share the land. We survive together, or not at all.

This first conversation about Mashkiki, the strength from the land, considers this relationship through the lens of a question about the night sky: what would it take for our communities to see the night sky?

Episode 2 Bad Indians Book Club: Mashkiki, Strength from the Land (part one)

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. Mashkiki is often translated as strength from the land, and in part one of this two part episode, we talk with authors, Daniel Heath Justice and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein about the natural world and our place in it. Additional panelists include Neil Ellis Orts, Jenessa Gallenkamp (who left the conversation and moderated the chat), Celeste Smith, and Ben Krawec. Recommended books for this conversation were: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Gathering Moss: A National and Cultural History of Mosses, Badger, Raccoon, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred.

What would it take for our community to see the night sky?

What I was reflecting on as we're going to move into the introductions was last night on Medicine for the Resistance we talked with Helen Knott and she had written a memoir In My Own Moccasins: A Memoir of Resistance, and we were talking about loss. The loss of relatives, the loss of place, the loss of connection, and we had been talking about connection to place and going home, and the feeling of the land remembering me when the first time that I went home and how incredibly powerful that was because I hadn't been expecting, I wasn't used to thinking in that way at that time.

And so to have that feeling of the land remembering me was really surprising. Then I would, and of course, I mean I was thinking how Kerry, my cohost would hear that she's part of the Black diaspora, doesn't know where that land is, that would know her ancestors. And then Helen made a comment later on in the conversation that her grandmother had told her what medicine shows up.

She was going through some stuff as we all do, and her grandmother had made a comment about medicine showing up. In the context of what we had said a few minutes earlier, it sounded like the land reaching out and offering something of itself, to any one of us. And it sounded to me, in the context of thinking about Kerry and how she might have heard the earlier part of the conversation and the loss that would be associated with that for her. I asked her about that. You know what. What medicine shows up for you? What in what way does the land reach out to welcome you and to know you? And so that in the context of our conversation, that's what I want to hear from each of you as we introduce ourselves. And then in, in the chat as well.

What medicine shows up for you? How does the land or the universe, whatever, what, whatever it is that reaches out to you.

Jenessa Galenkamp: So I read Braiding Sweetgrass like last year, but for this month I was reading Robin's other book called Gathering Moss.

And I haven't actually finished it yet, but I just think, just like reading, going through the book, the way that Robin writes about Moss, it almost feels like this love letter to moss. And I think just like reflecting on that, I've never heard, I've never really read a book where a single plant has been described in this way. And there's one particular chapter where she talks about reciprocity. It's called web of reciprocity, and it's like the chapter focuses on her journey trying to figure out what the traditional uses of moss were and figure out other, if moss was like loved by other people as how she loves moss and I thought it was really interesting in this chapter, and this might not be exactly the answer you're looking for, Patty, so I apologize.

But one of the things that she found was, one of the ways that moss reflects its best gift was in the hands of women. Most namely during their reproductive cycles and with babies. I thought this was interesting, like looking forward to next month's conversation where we're gonna be talking about mothers and made me think about how you called, like this month was like talking about how we're all connected and I was like, even in this book, like we're already connecting with the next month's topic a little bit. And I just thought that was pretty cool 

Celeste Smith: For me. Water's been showing up a lot. I actually started out as you know, because we've been friends for a long time, in the city and I gravitated out of the city and I came to an island, which is the biggest water island in the world, and I'm surrounded by water here. And when I was in the city, I would constantly try to get to the water, but it was super hard right to do that. So now if I live a few minutes from the water and I'm always going down there and just being here.

Ben Krawec: Yeah. So like Jenessa, I've been diving really hard into Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work. 'cause I've been studying ecological restoration for the last year or so, and that's pretty directly related to my chosen field and something in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass or a chapter about following in the footprints of Nanabozho really stuck with me because it's, it's about becoming Indigenous to place, right? And building and developing a connection with the land where you happen to be. And that struck a bit of a chord for me because like one side of my ancestry comes all the way over from Ukraine, where you know, where they were displaced by war on famine. And then the other chunk, another chunk of it comes way from way out Northwestern Ontario, which I mean, as much as I identify as Ojibwe, Northwestern Ontario Ojibwe is a different different brand of Ojibwe than you get in Central Ontario and that, so I, top of that, I've been in Toronto for the last, oh, I don't know, six months, half a year, on and off, on and off for a good long time now.

And it's been, it gets really difficult to feel a sense of connection to the land when you're surrounded by so much concrete and traffic and pollution and all that noise. But what's been keeping me sane out here is, doing a lot of back alley botanizing, and I've been noticing that the places where I tend to feel like the strongest sense of connection to land in Toronto, they're like, they're not necessarily the like the designated conservation spaces like Tommy Thompson Park or the ravines.

It's these little places in the alleys where little plants have been making a go of it. And the, and and the, there's these like little mounds of pigeon droppings and sand that kind of accumulate where things grow. I've been, no, there's this really cool thing that happens where, things like lamb's quarters here, things in the nightshade family, it's one little seed will find a crack and then grit and pigeon droppings will accumulate where this plant starts to grow and then slowly you can you can actually see gradients as you go further and further like through these alleys where you like, you'll see these little mounds of accumulated soil get bigger, and then the community of plants within these mounds will get more, more complex.

And most of these plants aren't Indigenous to the area. They're a lot of 'em, quote invasive. But if you sit and you watch for a little bit, it's like the birds in the area and the bugs, they don't seem to care too much. Or not, they're invasive. The bird, they're perfectly happy to come in and eat this, nibble on the seeds or the rodents will come in and chomp on them while they're still young.

I just, yeah, feel like I don't wanna talk the point to death, but I feel like you can see what I'm getting at though. That's, that sense that life and nature find a way, even when, and it tends, and it, and the beauty of it though, it's happening in the places where we didn't. Seek out to conserve anything. We didn't intentionally set this space aside. Things just, these processes just showed up and took root. 

Neil Orts: I, this is a curious question for me. So I recall you, Patty, telling this story when you first visited the, where you came from and you feeling the land calling to you. That story has haunted me ever since because I am so disconnected from the land of, where my people come from. I'm separated by an ocean. There's not a bit of Indigenousness in me to Texas or this whole continent, and it's made me wonder what it would be like to, I've never had an urge to visit Germany, but now I do wanna go visit Germany. And see if there's an experience there, because growing up on the farm I always felt very connected to that spot.

And also knowing that there were people there before me. I would, I remember sitting out at night and stargazing or whatever and listening to the highway, which was a half a mile away. But hearing traffic there and wondering what the people that we displaced, what they, what did they hear and what did they see and all those things.

So I, I think I've always had a feeling of not really belonging. I don't know if that's even the word, but when you talk about what my medicine comes to me from the land, I sense, smells are really strong for me when I. Go to the arboretum here in Houston, even though I'm surrounded by the sounds of the freeway just out of sight, the smells of that, the forest, it's protected land otherwise, and, running into creatures armadillos and things that I run into there, but the smells of the leaves and the plants, the dirt that is somehow resonant for me. When I read Braiding Sweetgrass, I felt like someone was articulating things that I felt, but I'd never thought to speak about.  I don't know how many people, living in Houston and all the concrete and what have you and city people. They're so many of them have never grown a plant in their lives. I don't even know how to talk to him about some of this, but luckily when I was reading Braiding Sweetgrass, a local performance artist of all things had a residency where she was doing public events and one of 'em was a reading group around Braiding Sweetgrass because she's very concerned about living in this city of oil business and pollution around that industry. Things explode now and then, and there's big plumes of smoke that cover the whole city and Yeah. And yeah and so that was also a nice connection to my performance art world that we had I don't know, I'm babbling now but yeah the smells are really strong and just the wonder about connecting to the dirt under your feet. 

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I feel like this is a complicated question for me. So I feel like I should, start by saying that I think sometimes the relationship that I have to land can be misunderstood because I'm, I was born in East Los Angeles, El Sereno if there's anybody in the audience from East Los.  But my mom was born in Barbados. I say sometimes I get articulated as like specifically even in the context of being Black, of not being Black of this land. And there's a lot of that. But then I think also people sometimes imagine that having that relationship with Barbados somehow mitigates the fact that occasionally people ask me like, what part of Africa did your family come from?

I can, I will never be able to answer that question. Or sometimes people say oh, at least your family doesn't have the same history of slavery. And I'm like, you do realize most of the enslaved people went not to the United States, but to Latin America and the Caribbean. So I feel like the question of land for me is always very fraught. And also that my mom and I have very different experiences with it. I should say. Like for her, it's been easier to find ways to root into the land that she is on, in ways where she tries to be respectful of local communities. And this might be a generational thing that for me, that's more challenging.

And so I bring this up to say that the last year being in lockdown has meant for the first time in my entire life, I actually sat and watched seasons in an area that was not urban. So I, and I found myself asking different questions and this translated into um ..  So I live in on the New Hampshire Sea Coast. I also write a column for New Scientist that I think probably readers of my column were really surprised when I popped up like late in spring last year with a column about how blue jays are not blue. Because I had spent, I had found myself in this situation where I was watching blue jays and not just look, there's a blue Jay, which had been my experience very occasionally, I would see one somewhere, but where I was actually seeing them every day and watching their behavior. And finding myself curious about what they were and how they worked and asking all of these other questions that I had never asked because I had never really been in an environment where I was really watching other creatures living on the land.

And so I think, like right now, a lot of my relationship with the land is actually watching how all of the others are living on the land. From the desk I'm sitting at right now, 'cause I'm sitting right in front of a window that looks out onto a wooded area. And so watching, I learned that blue jays are very aggressive. I watched one fight with a cardinal over a tree at one point. Um, all of these things I've been watching the deer in that have recently started to emerge and consume and I guess I am very aware that in many ways this is not like I can't be rooted in this land in the way that like other people are particularly the Abenaki people and the Penobscot people who come from a little bit north of where I am.  And at the same time, like part of the challenge that those of us in the Black Atlantic find ourselves in is like that we have to find a way to build relationships with where we are. We are creolized in our relationship with the land and that is a painful task. But also something that we have to learn to live with and in not hating ourselves, not hate that and live with the complexity of that I am.

I do feel like the other thing that I should mention is that I've also spent a lot of time, because The Disordered Cosmos came out, talking publicly about Kanaka Maoli native Hawaiian land. And what's interesting is that not many people have asked me if I have been to Mauna Kea, which is contested land in the fight over the 30 meter telescope. I have sacrificed professionally to fight with Kanaka folks. I have also never been to the Mauna and I don't think I need to in order to feel very rooted in that struggle and in that land. And so I think sometimes it's not about physicality, but sometimes our land ties are through political solidarity.

And I think that's like especially true for those of us in the African diaspora who have experienced such extensive displacement that our sense of the land is almost that we are rooted in all of the political struggles of the land. So I guess the last comment I will make about that is when I first started thinking about what to do, when I realized that Kanaka were being criminalized is I knew that vocabulary as a Black person. I knew that vocabulary very intimately. Of being  criminalized for defending your community. I also asked myself what would I do if it was Barbados? And I knew that I would want people to fight with me if it was Barbados. And so even though Barbados is not where my land ties begin, there is something also about being island people that tied me to the Kanaka struggle and to their land struggle.

And as I say in the book. I promise I'm not trying to sell it. I'm just pointing out that I say this in the, but I have a chapter called Lessons from the Mauna that Kanaka, the movement for sovereignty and the fight to articulate what has been called their epauno science saved me as a scientist. And I know that wasn't the goal, but it is nonetheless what happened.  And again, I've never been to the Mauna, but I still feel very tied to it in that way. And for me, I think that I am. Being in struggle with Kanaka Maoli people has been medicine. 

Patty Krawec: When I read that part, because at the time that I was reading that, I was also, I had just done a couple of presentations to labor groups for International Women's Day. And then I think your book arrived a day or two later, and so then I get to that part of the chapter where you're like, I can't cross a picket line. I can't cross a picket line. And that was just like really because of the context that I was coming to that from, it was just an incredibly powerful thing.

I can't cross a picket line that's, that's going to be my relationship. And that was just, it's, and people should buy your book. You go ahead and pitch it. People should buy it. It's a really, a really good book. Daniel, what medicine shows up for you? 

Daniel Heath Justice: I think it's a complicated question for me too. Behind me is a picture of where I grew up in Colorado, which is not Cherokee territory, but it's where I call home. That's my heart home more than any place in the world because that I'm third generation of my mom's family who were part of the mining influx that contributed to Ute people's dispossession.

And now I live in shíshálh swiya on the Sunshine Post in British Columbia, which isn't Cherokee territory. After the Trail of Tears, we were driven from our territory into other people's territory. And so I, the relationship with land is always a really complicated one for me too. And yet, I think that the whole issue we're talking about is how do you, how are you in relation to land in ways that aren't about laying claim, but asserting obligation. And not just to the human peoples who call it home, but also the other than human peoples. And I love where I live here on the Sunshine Coast. It's a beautiful place and under lockdown as well. For me, I'm a, I'm an animal person much more than I'm called to plants except for trees. Trees are the plant that I'm really drawn to, but I've become much more attentive to the little plants of Ben's comments. I had no idea there were all these little flowers. And now I'm finding out what these are. I just learned about this thing called miner's lettuce the other day, which is amazing. And I had no idea this stuff existed. It's green leaf with flowers popping out of the middle.

And I think for me, when I'm, when I think about that relationship, trying as much as possible to. To have it be infused by wonder and humility. These aren't my lands. This is, and I will never belong to the land in the ways that the Shíshálh people belong to these lands. But I hopefully can be in honorable relationship with this land and be continually surprised and delighted and sometimes frightened and confused by the relationship and the interactions here as well. Because I think oftentimes when we're talking about being in relationship with land, we're presuming an inevitably positive one, but it's complicated. Just like it's complicated for our other than human kin. And I think that's important too.

In terms of medicine, we did, under pandemic we decided to put up a new garden bed. And I had some old tobacco from Ontario and I tried to grow tobacco when I was in Ontario, when I was north of Toronto. And it was a dismal failure. And I planted it last year and it went wild. Like it. I did not know you could have so much tobacco.

I did not know what I was doing, but it was amazing. And so I had this really incredible harvest of old tobacco that I was able to gift to people. It was far more than I could do anything with, but it was, it felt very much like an important opportunity for sharing because it came very unexpectedly to me. It did was not because I know what I'm doing, but it was, it. It was really amazing to have so much tobacco that I could actually gift because I'm usually the one who's gifted tobacco. And so it was a really beautiful experience. So I think for me it's the, that unexpected part of the relationship.

And one thing that drives me crazy here in BC is oftentimes you'll hear people say that they're an uninvited guest on Shíshálh land or Musqueam land. And I'm like, that makes no sense. You cannot be an uninvited guest. You're either an invited guest or you are not. But an uninvited guest makes no sense to me. You can be a visitor, you can be a hopefully honorable visitor. You can be an invader. And so thinking about where I am, I'm not an uninvited guest. I'm not even an invited guest, but I hope that I am, I hope that I'm moving toward being an honorable guest in these, or an honorable visitor in these lands.  And if I can, if I am invited to be a guest, that's all the better. But I just, I hope that the work I do here doesn't make the relations harder for the people who are from this place. Yeah. Anyway, but with thinking about that relationship to land and what that calls on us to do, I think. It's very complicated for all of us in very different ways, right?

Patty Krawec: So in Undrowned,by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, she writes it's meditations about sea mammals. And so it's lessons on Black feminism, meditations on sea mammals. And she writes about this giant sea mammal who had weighed up to 23 tons swimming in the Bering sea. A German naturalist discovered hydrodamalis gigas swimming, large and lux, she writes, at least three times bigger than the contemporary manatee. Within 27 years, the entire species was extinct, so 27 years. So she, Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix. Within 27 years, this beautiful creature was extinct. And then she makes the comment that being discovered is dangerous.

And, so Daniel, I'm gonna stick with you because actually, your comment about being a guest uninvited or otherwise, a trespasser,  invader, a discoverer. And in your books Badger and Raccoon, you talk about the risk. The danger that being discovered had for badgers.

And I realized actually that I have a badger stole that I caught at a yard sale and I didn't realize until after I read your book and I just looked at it, it's I think that's badger. So yeah, so I liberated it from somebody's yard sale, but now it just has an extra little layer of meaning for me.

So can you talk a little bit about that, about, with badgers and raccoons and how dangerous it has been for them to be discovered? 

Daniel Heath Justice: I think when we talk about discovery, what we're talking about is exploitability. We're not talking about relations, and that I think is the key moment. And if you are valuable as an exploitable object, you're in danger. If you're not useful as an exploitable object, you're also in danger. I think that's the situation for both raccoons and badgers and for so many other beings is if you are thought of as a commodity,  use value in either direction puts you at risk.

It's only when you're considered as a relative or a being with inherent value on your own merits. According to your own priorities, you're not endangered in the same way. Discovery is always about exploitation. It's, and whether, whether it's material exploitation or ideological exploitation, the language of discovery is about extraction, transformation into some sort of transferable commodity.

And so I think that's the real danger is so much of the conversation that we have in ecology is, a lot of people are trying to communicate the value of nature, but they're doing it within a frame that is only going to be more problematic and more exploitable. And I think that's the conundrum we have is that there are reasons why people go toward capitalist language to try to communicate the importance of things, but that's only to make it easier to appropriate and wound. So I think we have to get out of that kind of language. And Robin, Wall Kimmerer has gotten a lot of deserved attention here, but I think her piece in Orion on the language of animacy. I think it's an important direction to go in thinking about kinship and relationship. But even then, I think, how many times do we see language about relatives being language about those who are exploitable and those who aren't. So even in thinking about relations, we also have to think about the power dynamics within those relations. It's easy to call somebody family and still screw 'em over. So I think always having that power analysis within that is, is important. And, it is as important for our human kin as it is for our other than human kin. But yeah, I think that the issue of language is really important in thinking about discovery.  If you're turned into, if you're useful, you're gonna die. If you're not useful, you're gonna die. Discovery is about death. It's not about thriving. 

Patty Krawec: Wow. You are right. You're right. I hadn't even thought about that. But you're absolutely right. Chanda, that kind of goes to what you were talking about regarding Mauna Kea and, the discovery or the noticing you call it I, the seeing was good, good seeing and how that has affected, so could you talk a little bit more about that? 

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah. So I think the thing that's coming to mind, particularly as you mentioned, the question of seeing is that also this consumption happens not just to our bodies and to our lands, but also to our, with our ideas. And this really the intersects when you start talking about what constitutes good seeing. So just to define that for everybody, one of the reasons that the fight about Mauna Kea is happening at all is because it is at a very high altitude, so there’s five certain layers of the atmosphere. It's a great place to put a telescope, and this is something astronomers knew, partly because like native Hawaiians told them themselves about it, that when Europeans first showed up, they were like, check out this awesome place we have to look at the sky. And this was embedded in the cosmology of Kanaka folks and in their self-conception. And here I wanna point to Keolu Fox who is a Kanaka Maoli, a geneticist and bioethicist, who I just saw, gave like this really powerful talk where he was talking about how our genome is shaped by the land. [Dr. Keolu Fox on Medicine for the Resistance: The Land is my Ancestor]

And then at the very end of the talk, he looped it back around and said what? “When I say that the land is my ancestor, I literally am telling you that I can show you using science, that my genome was shaped by the land and so was your genome. So when we're telling you that we're fighting over our ancestor and we are fighting over our family member, that's a scientific statement.  Let me be clear with you that from my point of view as a Kanaka scientist, this is this a scientific statement.” 

When we talk about colonizing the land. Part of what was being colonized was this idea that Europeans discovered that it was a good place to look at the sky when that was already known by the people who were there and had developed their own sensibility. What therefore people's relationship to that land should be because of its specific location relative to the sky, Wākea the sky, father. And so I think that, one of the pieces that can sometimes get lost in these conversations about consumption is that it's, I think it's easier for us to grasp material consumption that is, has this physicality to it, that's immediately obvious to us.

Consuming the labor of Black people, consuming the bodies of, for example, Indigenous women. All of these different ways that there's physical consumption, but also not thinking about the consumption of Indigenous ideas as that the enlightenment is built out of Europeans traveling around the world.

Meeting ideas and saying, Hey, that's cool. And taking it back to Europe and collating it, and Europe becoming this unique geography for thought in a particular sense, right? I don't wanna say objectively or universally, but in this particular sense because all of this information is being collated in one place, which does give people this interesting opportunity to put ideas from different geographies in conversation with each other in a way that they are not in conversation with each other elsewhere. That's not to say it's the only conversation or even the most important one, but it does produce this one line of thought. So when we talk about consumption, material consumption, I think it's a really, and when we talk about discovery that part of what needs to be thought about is how often what is identified as discovery isn't discovery at all. 

Even if we are taking the word on its face value definition and not sitting there doing the material analysis of what it does to people's lives to be discovered that what discovery usually means is, just to put it colloquially, we came, we noticed you had some shit. We took your shit. Which I'm just like summarizing in some sense, like what Daniel said. And sometimes what we noticed was your body, or sometimes what we noticed was your expertise and that we will simultaneously not recognize you as an expert. We will gaslight you and your descendants for generations and centuries. And say that we were the expert. Then I just wanna tie this to diversity and inclusion since, we're talking about books that talk about science today, but then the message is, we want to bring Black people into science. We want to bring Indigenous youth into science and share them that like science is interesting and exciting and it's, yeah, they've, we've been doing rational knowledge production and analysis the entire time. Some of what y'all know is stuff that we told you, right? And so diversity and inclusion discourse in a real way can be thought of as the next step of colonialism, which is “I'm colonizing your mind to not see our history for what it was.”

Patty Krawec: And I also, I really liked in your book Chanda, talk about, and I've heard Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz do the same thing. Europe, being a peninsula of Asia and just really situating it geographically for people. I've, I heard Roxanne in a workshop, say in a webinar, say that and it's absolutely the truth. I don't know why we think of it as a continent. It's a peninsula jutting off of Asia. It's, it doesn't even meet the criteria for a continent. And yet somehow we think that it is, but. They just, you're right. They just grabbed everything and then collated it in their own particular way and wrote it down, which made it, wrote it down in a very particular way, which gave it a kind of finality, now this is the way it is, and then everybody else gets compared to that, and it's really, it really hasn't, it just hasn't been helpful.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Can I just make a comment about the European Peninsula of Asia thing? I am, because I use this term in the book, and I have to say that part of it was like The Disordered Cosmos was supposed to be like a science book, right? There's okay, y'all want science. Let's talk science by our scientific definition that is not a continent. So like it has to be downgraded if we're going to be accurate. That's right. And that was how I thought about it. I was waiting for, I actually haven't gotten any questions about it, but that's my answer. It's just not, it's an unscientific statement. Thank you.

Daniel Heath Justice: So Europe is, Pluto is what you're saying.

Patty Krawec: Europe is the Pluto of the world. So Ben, you hadposted something on Facebook about your favorite thing to do when you discover ramps, when you come across ramps, when you. Your favorite thing to do, you go for a walk and you saw ramps and so what is your favorite thing to do and why does that matter?

Why is it important? 

Ben Krawec: It's leave them the heck alone and keep their location secret because, yeah, so I'm in a …  Daniel, so I'm sure you meet plenty of these people out west, but there's a kind of resurgence? I don't know. There's this, it's becoming really trendy again to go and harvest wild foods and a lot of people think that living in good, really loving nature and being in good relationship with nature just means knowing what plants out there are good for you and how they're edible. And it's like they're so enthusiastic about building this relationship and they just fly at it like Leeroy Jenkins.

They jump into it without any real plan or knowing what they're doing. That's what I'm saying. And the wild, the wild ramps were just about extirpated from Eastern North America by people doing exactly that. And so I think these conversations about discovery, I mean the Mississauga of Central Ontario probably weren't too stoked when ramps were discovered by settlers.

And yeah. And then so looping that back to relationship to land, sometimes acting in good relationship to something and acting in a loving way to something involves just leaving it the heck alone, right? Like you love it from a safe and respectful distance. If you are going to harvest something, make sure you know exactly what its lifecycle is, like, how it reproduces, how long it takes to germinate, what conditions it takes to germinate in.

Patty Krawec: Celeste, can you talk a little bit about,  you had a change in direction in your life. You went from, I'm going to fight on the world stage to what are we fighting for? 

Celeste Smith: And I was working with the UN and I discovered in myself that what I really was fighting for with food sovereignty with something that was not being practiced and I thought, well actually my great aunt passed away and she was a great agriculturalist for my nation, and I had lost so much by not taking that time and going with her and spending that time with her. I felt like a huge hole because I thought here I was, in university and wasting all this time the knowledge was being passed down and I wasn't there. I was missing it. It just went right through my fingers and I just felt a great sadness and I thought, what and I working towards, what am I doing? Is it ego driven? And I just had a real big time with myself. Okay, so what do I wanna spend the rest of my life doing? Is it going to school? Is it being in a colonial structure where I'm fighting every tooth and nail academics?

And sure, that's exciting, but what does that give us as a people? So I switched, and now I'm farming. I'm doing agricultural knowledge on the land, literally building a center for traditional agricultural knowledge for Indigenous women and youth to literally bring us on to the land so that we can learn together. Practice mutual sovereignty. So I just talked about it with other academics who also wanna talk about it. So what we're doing is we're. We're planting the seed literally in ourselves, and I think that's gonna do a lot of healing. That's what I'm doing now. Real journey, because there's a lot that we don't know and there's a lot that we've lost, but you were talking about medicine and medicine coming to me, and that's what's coming to me.

Seeds are coming to me. People are bringing me things. That thing, can you plant this? You have land, can you plant this for me and keep it going. There's actually, it's a bizarre place there. In the island that I live, there's no public land. There is no crown land here. Bizarre. It's all public, it's all private land. That's a nature conservancy, trying to take care of nature, trying to, to modify it, but they don't let Indigenous people share in it. So what are they doing with it? So I had a conversation with someone with one of the board members, and I thought, you know what we need?  We need to share this land and they said “I just don't think that's a really good fit with that. I don't think that's a good fit.” Wow. Indigenous people are not a good fit. That's really interesting that you say that. But yeah, I'll be coming after him in the next couple years. 

Ben Krawec: Hell yeah. 

Celeste Smith: But we think about. Land use and land, land back. What does that physically mean? What does land and sovereignty mean? What does food sovereignty mean? It means these things, something ground. 

Patty Krawec: And I like what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang say, yes, it does mean give the land back. It actually means give it back. It's not a metaphor. Give it back, figure it out.

So I know Neil, you plant things, every year I watch your peppers grow and your morning glories.

Neil Orts: The peppers are an accident. I had bought a poblano from the grocery store and it's just teeming with seeds inside. And I was like let's see if these germinate. They did and I have two plants that have survived almost two years now on my balcony. Houston has a long growing season, and I eat poblanos from my bushes. They are smaller than what I got at the grocery store. They're not as spicy. They're very mild, but it's kind of a cool thing. Now, I've tried a lot of other things that have failed miserably. I've tried growing beans. I've tried growing some kinds of peas and other things, so it's not like I have an exceptionally green thumb for this sort of balcony gardening. But I also have different things, like I have an, some sort of citrus tree that I'm not really sure what kind of citrus tree it is. It could be a lemon, it could be an orange or a grapefruit, but it's about as tall as I am now in a pot. Completely by accident germinated from a seed. I sometimes compost on my balcony as well. And this is where this seed germinated and I was like, okay, it's green, it's growing. I'll, we'll see what happens. It never bloomed, but I don't know that it ever will. And, and my morning glories last year took off. I’ve tried several times before. They had never taken off before. Last year they didn’t. They seem to be doing okay this year so far. But it's, I don't know what it is in me that wants to do this exactly, other than I'm a farm boy that was always around things growing. Besides having our gardens and our farmland, mom always had lots of potted plants to it, and I was always interested. That seems to mystify so many of my friends. It's like I'm doing magic or something. I don't know. 

Patty Krawec: There is something magical about growing food.

Yeah. Ben's right. I am not the person who's going to get out there and weed that garden. And he's done a really good job of making sure that planting things that don't require, that aren't gonna be high maintenance. But there is something really magical about putting seeds in the ground and then eating them.

Neil Orts: There's a mystery about it. I grant you that, yeah, but it's also just like the most natural thing in the world. Yeah, 

Patty Krawec: it's amazing. 

Neil Orts: It happens without us, 

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I will say that one of the realizations I had last spring was that I found buds to be really creepy.

I realize that's like a socialization thing. I think it's because so much of my experience of seeing things in there right before their opening stage was through the lens of like alien movies that when I was actually confronted with seeing a lot of them, that I felt like my garden was about to attack me and I had to like have this whole conversation with myself. But no, the movies are based on that, not the other way around.

Neil Orts: WEll and depending on your sensitivity to pollen, they may be attacking you, but that's a whole…

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: fair. That's fair. But it definitely was informative about what happens when we get put in situations where we're not surrounded by a lot of things that are growing or we're from different I did see things grow growing up in Los Angeles, but I saw like ice plant, which is like very hard to get started and it doesn't have these buds that pop out every spring and look like little aliens that are about to light. You can tell I still have this *whoosh* 

Patty Krawec: so there were two things that came together for me. In undrowned again, because I just finished it. She's writing about dolphins and whales and how they use echolocation and how echolocation, and she's talking about echolocation being a kind of relationship, right? Because it's bouncing a sound and then getting in and then getting information back. Then she talks about these dolphins that live in the Ganges River, and it's so silty. They really, they can't, they, they don't have much vision. Visual ability. And so they're constantly saying, I'm here. I'm here. And responding back, I'm here. And so this, this constant echolocation.

And then for me, that combined with Badger, there's a part in Badger, Daniel where you write that the more distanced we become, the more potential there is for other than human relatives to just become shallow symbols forgotten or actively disregarded. And so for me, those two ideas came together in my head that for echolocation to work we have to be, we have to be in good relationship with each other because if echolocation is showing predators where we are, that is not, so we need to be close enough to be in good relationship with each other and to see each other, to see each other in a good way.

So I guess, Daniel I'm throwing back to you about that potential about how we get distanced and we get distanced in city life. We just get distance. Even in the country and I get distanced. Ben's always reminding me that if I'm gonna be connected to nature, I have to actually go out into it. 

Daniel Heath Justice: Yeah this is one of those, it's a challenging conversation in a lot of ways because intimacy can also be violent, right?

So distance and intimacy, I think, these are always in context. And and I, thinking back to Ben's comment about, sometimes the best thing to do is just leave things alone. There's also that idea when we're, when we are asking the world for permission, what if they say, what if the world says no?

What happens when animals don't wanna have anything to do with us? And I think I, I think there's a really important tension at play between being connected and being, and going back to the idea of about exploitativeness, like how many men think that love is about possessiveness, right? And then the violence that's associated with that.

And we do that with our pets. And I'm a, I've got, one of the reasons I keep looking down is 'cause my dogs are very interested in what's happening here. And one thing up, one of them wants up on my lap while we're doing all this, but there's even the basic foundations of pet ownership are coercive and violent. And, being somebody who has furry animals who live in our house, I mean that the foundation of that relationship is still one that's very dangerous to them. Like we, we dominate everything about their lives out of love. And it's a very complicated tension to grapple with, I think distance, it's easier to, it's easier to get into a commodifying mindset at a distance, but closeness brings danger to, and I think we have to sit with the difficulties of both intimacy and distance and bring an ethical lens. And Chanda said, bring different ways of thinking and different ways of relating and different ways of imagining into those relationships. Because I think an intimate, an intimacy that is based on a patriarchal mindset is murderous. So I think proximity isn't enough. We have to change the way in which we're in relationship. 

Patty Krawec: It actually goes really nicely into a quote from Chandra's book, which I think is the husband's quote. We are a quark assembly of supernova remnants on a journey to honor, to know and honor all our galactic relations.

Galactic relations, I think is the part from your husband, but I just love that phrase because that's kind of what Daniel's talking about. It's not necessarily about physical closeness. How do we know and honor our galactic relations when they're so far from us? How do we do that?

I just love that phrase, quark assembly of supernova remnants on a journey to know and honor all our galactic relationship. Yeah. 

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: So the quark assembly. That part is me. It was actually a running joke that for a while I bet, I had a bet with someone that if I put quark assembly on the bottom of my slides for my talk to see if anybody would ask me about it, because someone was like, oh, you'll definitely get asked about it and nobody has ever asked me, what does quark assembly mean? I'm asking, sometimes when you're giving professional talks, you're supposed to put the name at the, your name at the bottom of every slide so people remember your name. So occasionally I would slip in Chanda Prescod-Weinstein quark assembly, and it really, it should be like a quark and electron assembly, if I was really being careful there.

But all our galactic relations is something that my spouse came up with. And I also feel like I have to mention Eve Tuck here because the moment that he said that to me, I was like, I really love that phrase, but I also wanna be careful about where it came from. And so I reached out to Eve to have a conversation with her about the different ways that might be rooted in different modes of thought and wanting to make sure that we were being respectful in its use.

And so folks who pick up the book will also see that I make a point at that section, all our galactic relations, that's the fourth phase of the book that it opens with Winona LaDuke and then actually I spent a lot of time on Black feminism in that last phase of the book. And even so a lot of the multiple chapters open with the words of non-Black Indigenous women.

And I was proactively throughout the book thinking about closing this gap. Of Black as non-Indigenous or Indigenous as fundamentally non-Black in a couple of different ways, which is that, there are fam out there who are Black and Indigenous in the sense that I think we all understand the word Indigenous to mean and not just our folks who are Freedmen, but also folks who are Black and Indigenous in other ways.

But I also did want to grapple a little bit with the fact that my ancestors were Indigenous people who were torn away from their Indigenous communities. And in some sense, the way that in the word Indigenous gets constructed, particularly in our academic discourses, I think our grassroots discourses can actually be more flexible.

But in our academic discourses are very much, you either are or you aren't. Here are the rules, and what I found this to translate into is breaks and our solidarity that I think don't necessarily need to exist in our ability to be in political solidarity, but also finding myself in environments where people are like, yes, our organization has Indigenous people from Northern Europe and Indigenous people from Latin America and the United States and Australia. And then I'm like, so where are the Africans? And they were like, yeah, we don't have any African members. And so then you have this whole continent that's constructed as non-Indigenous somehow. And I think the vehicle for that unconstruction, I would say as Indigenous is Black American as framing Black Americans as fundamentally non-Indigenous because we can't articulate our claims to our land and to our traditional communities, and therefore the people who remained in those communities by virtue of also being Black in this social sense of Black are therefore also not Indigenous.

And so I was in small ways I think, it wasn't the centerpiece of the book, I did want to push that a little bit, but in a way that it felt like reaching out and being in community as opposed to, I wanna fight with people about this word. I wanna fight with people about what? Like about ownership over a word. Because I think in some sense some of this is about ownership. And that I don't wanna reproduce that ownership narrative, that capitalist conversation that Daniel was talking about earlier. So I just wanted to share that was the story and even as the book came out, I was nervous about it. I was like, I wonder if people are gonna take “all our galactic relations” and say this is, I am appropriation and I'm, I didn't, we feel we are so hurt by white supremacy and colonialism that I didn't want somebody to feel hurt. I think like even if like I hadn't done anything wrong, that's not the point. I didn't want anybody to feel hurt by a book that I hoped would feel like it was for us and that us could maybe be more expansive than maybe we had been thinking about it.

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 Lenapehoking.  Our theme is biindigan an original hand drum song composed and performed by Nicole Joy Fraser.

Cover art is Wanada Parker by J NiCole Hatfield. You can see more of her work on her website.

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.”

Preorder 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

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