The overturning of Roe v Wade and the failure to codify rights to abortion as legislation symbolize a slide backward for the progress that decades of organizing efforts made toward reproductive freedom and justice. Amid the anger and fear created by this new reality, there is also a vibrant movement emerging to ensure women have access to reproductive health while coming up with strategies to finally embed this right into legislation.
But as Vanessa Daniel discusses here, there are also aspects of the reproductive justice movement that are important to emphasize as we move forward. Historically, the U.S. government has targeted poor people (mostly women) – and poor women of color in particular – for eugenic sterilization. This hidden history is beginning to emerge in some academic and activist corners, though as I detailed in my documentary, A Dangerous Idea: Eugenics, Genetics, and the American Dream, these efforts diminished after WWII. On the contrary, rates of sterilization rose exponentially in the 1950s and particularly during the 1960s.
The Nixon administration lifted a ban on the use of government assistance to pay for sterilization procedures but never sent guidelines to the doctors in hundreds of federal clinics around the country to ensure this new rule wasn’t abused. As a result, many doctors took it upon themselves to determine who would and wouldn’t have children. Up to half a million mostly Indigenous and African American women and girls were sterilized without their knowledge or consent, and were coerced with threats to withhold federal assistance if they didn’t agree to an operation. No one has been held accountable. A lawsuit by the Southern Poverty Law Center helped to stop the second wave of sterilizations in the U.S., but abuses have continued in some prisons and hospitals.
Another aspect of the reproductive justice movement to understand is how this multifaceted movement has evolved over time to protect women and girls from these kinds of human rights violations. So many people who get involved come from very different experiences and with a wide range of knowledge of the movement’s history.
I spoke with Vanessa Daniel about these and other topics. This is an excerpt from our interview.
Vanessa Daniel
VANESSA: So reproductive justice is really defined by a few key variables: one is the leadership. The movement was founded by black women, and it’s a little over 20 years ago now that the term reproductive justice was coined. It’s now a multi-racial movement, and there are many white women and genderqueer and transgender people of all races who are part of it, but the leadership of women of color remains predominant and unique, I think, as far as social movements go in this country.
The second element is that it’s multi-issue. The traditional reproductive health and rights movement really invited people in through one doorway, which is around abortion rights, the legal right to abortion specifically, and then, to some extent, contraception. Reproductive justice groups have said those doorways make a lot of sense in terms of the top priorities for middle and upper-class white cisgender women. But for the broader set of people, including low-income white women, people actually want to enter the movement through different doorways. Some young people want to enter in through comprehensive sex ed or through the importance of reducing stigma and school pushout for teen parents.
You have a whole swathe of people who are entering around environmental issues. Native women are saying abortion is an important issue for us, but not our top issue; our top issue is the fact that our aunties and cousins and so many folks on our land are actually experiencing reproductive health cancers from toxins and uranium mining and pollution. You have many women of color entering through surviving the U.S. prison industrial complex with issues around stopping the shackling of pregnant women during labor and delivery who are incarcerated, conditions of confinement, stopping the pipeline into prisons. There are a whole host of issues.
The separation of families at the border is a reproductive justice issue that echoes a legacy that we’ve seen in so many communities of color, whether it’s the separation of black families from their children on the auction blocks in slavery to theft of native children who were taken into mission schools and abused, causing generations of trauma, to the internment of Japanese and the separation of families through deportation and exclusion acts in this country. It is a very recent manifestation of a very long-standing American tradition in fact in this country, and it’s a reproductive justice issue.
The fact that black women still suffer maternal mortality rates that are four times that of white women in this country is a reproductive justice issue. Birthing justice, the ability to access midwifery care, doula care. So this full spectrum of things.
Reproductive justice has shown and proved that if you create more doorways for people to open to enter the movement, more people come in, you have a stronger grassroots base of support, and you have a base that actually has the strength to win against the very united opposition that we are facing, which is very lockstep anti-LGBT, anti-immigrant, anti-abortion access, white supremacist. We need a very diverse movement, and as Audre Lorde said, there’s no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. And that really is the ethos of reproductive justice.
STEPHANIE: Are you seeing more awareness about the different experiences that white women and women of color have had historically when it comes to reproductive justice? How are these multifaceted organizing efforts going?
VANESSA: That’s an excellent question. I think that one of the fundamental things to understand about the different experience of white women and women of color is that historically, patriarchy has exerted itself on white women’s bodies with a pressure to have children, to procreate white children who are “desirable” additions to the population. So it makes sense that for white women, priority issues would be the ability to actually have the agency to choose not to do that, and so thus very focused on access to birth control, on the right to abortion, the right to sterilization if they choose. That’s fine and that makes sense in that context.
With the exception of what was forced child-bearing of black women during slavery in order to create more people that were considered property under slavery, women of color who can bear children have been seen as producing children that are “undesirable.” So there’s been a pressure to control and suppress that reproduction. Thus you see forced and coerced sterilization and those types of things. You also see the way in which our children, even children who are born, the virulent attack through state violence and racism on their ability to live and survive – and in the case of many groups – even make it past the age of 20 is a real factor. So for women of color, it makes sense that reproductive justice must include the right not to have a child, but also the right to have children, the right to parent them in safe environments.
So part of what’s happened in race relations is because of the power differential – that white women have more wealth just as a group comparatively to women of color, have more access to power, that in institutions like the one where I worked, in philanthropy – the priorities that white women identify as at the top have been what’s resourced, what’s defined as credible and important, is to the exclusion of many of the issues that impact women of color. So you have white women feminist organizations going onto reservations and saying come and join us and help us in the fight for abortion to native women who are literally dying because of uranium mining that is causing rampant reproductive cancers in their communities.
There is a lot of work that needs to be done in the feminist movement to mend the Achilles heel of race that has divided us in ways that make it harder for us to win for anybody. There’s more work happening now to try to heal that. There are many white women who are doing a lot of their own internal work to undo white supremacy in their own consciousness and to stand in solidarity with women of color, and not just verbally.
Like my good friend and colleague, Mia Birdsong, who says you cannot call yourself my friend and do nothing to dismantle the systems that are trying to kill me and my children. So it’s not about saying the right things. It’s about, do you actually stand up. Are you standing up when black people are being murdered by the police? And some of them are standing up, and more of them need to.
STEPHANIE: When I was working on my film, I followed the work of a group that was seeking justice for women who’d been sterilized in California against their will. Can you talk a little bit about that history and whether that human rights issue is coming up in the movement, and if there’s a concern that it will continue, particularly for women who are incarcerated?
VANESSA: There’s a long history of forced and coerced sterilization. In recent history, we have Puerto Rico, where close to one-third of the child-bearing population was sterilized to the extent that they shut down many schools there because there weren’t enough children to attend. There’s an incredible documentary called La Operación that documents that. Many Native American women have been sterilized against their will, many disabled people who have been sterilized, and in California, some lawsuits have resulted in settlements, though there are also cases in which nothing has been done. But I think we need to look at that as part of the broader constellation of ways that the bodies of people who can get pregnant are controlled and where our constitutional rights are taken away.
Reproductive justice really provides a framework to think about returning that agency to all of us in the many ways that it shows up and that these are not different things. Oftentimes we think, oh, the woman who has kids is different than the person who gets sterilized, is different than the person who’s denied access to contraceptive care. In fact, these issues are all interconnected ways that the bodies of people who can get pregnant – and I include women and transgender and genderqueer folks in that – are really controlled by patriarchy, by white supremacist systems. So we need to see all of that together and work against it.
When we think about the right to birth, and the right to birth in the way that we feel is empowering – whether that’s in a hospital, whether that’s having a midwife or a doula, whether that’s having traditional cultural practices that are important to whether a woman is in a native community or Afro-diasporic community – that is part of and connected to the right and ability to access abortion that’s safe and affordable.
The other thread that connects all of those is the way in which women of color in particular, and people of color who can get pregnant are disproportionately impacted by barriers to accessing those things. We know that the sterilizations that have occurred have disproportionately impacted those groups, and that is who disproportionately was in the California prisons who were impacted by that.
STEPHANIE: There was also the case in the mid-90s when doctors were pushing long-term birth control on young women of color, some were coerced into being guinea pigs for various experimental drugs, some were bribed. It was only through women fighting back that this program was canceled, right?
VANESSA: Yes,there was a group of young women of color in the Bronx who were organizing around this. They said they would go to the doctor for appointments, and doctors were very aggressively marketing long-acting contraceptives to them. Of course, we want choices, like a menu of options that may include some of those long-acting methods, but it is a problem when that is being pushed over other methods. There should be a neutral delivery of the information, the benefits, and the risks to all these different methods, so the patient can make an informed decision for themselves. It shouldn’t be marketing because of money from foundations or pharmaceutical companies or indicators of success that are kind of driving towards one method or the other.
There’s a long history, I think, in communities of color of not only aggressive marketing of these things, but of some of these products being tested on our communities, treating them as guinea pigs. The original birth control pill was tested on women in Puerto Rico. I think it was about 50 or 60 times the strength of the pill now that we know to be safe. The same thing with the HPV vaccine. There was a campaign to get the CDC to cease and desist from requiring this for young girls who were immigrating to come into the country. Coercion has to be taken out of the equation.
STEPHANIE:What is an example of a recent success story when it comes to a coalition working together to address a specific reproductive justice issue?
VANESSA: One example is the Reproductive Health Equity Act in Oregon. The way that this was won was a set of people of color-led organizations from reproductive justice, and other social justice sectors ended up getting involved in what was a historically all-white coalition for reproductive rights in the state of Oregon, and they lobbied very hard within that coalition that there be a bill that would be inclusive of the full spectrum of reproductive healthcare, and public funding for it, and it would also be inclusive of all groups, including – and this was a very radical proposition – undocumented immigrants and transgender, gender non-conforming people.
They got a lot of pushback, saying there’s no way that we can move this through with those groups, we need to take those groups out of it because it is going to be easier and more palatable to pass, it won’t be as threatening. They were able to create a multi-racial coalition to have a conversation and come to the agreement that they were going to leave these groups in. As a result, there were other coalitions in the state that cared about immigrants, that cared about the LGBT community, that really cared about expansive safety nets, who then galvanized along with them and created even more momentum for it to pass. And there was enough momentum that even when they tried to repeal it a year later, it couldn’t be repealed.
So I think there’s a real lesson here. Oregon is not the most conservative of the states, but it’s definitely not the most progressive of states. There’s a strong white supremacist thread in Oregon, dating all the way back to when it was founded, and there are a lot of issues in that state. But successes like this are possible.
It is possible for us to wrestle with the work and stand together. I think that that is work that all of us have to do, even in communities of color, looking to the groups that are marginalized and actually fighting for solutions that protect them as well. For example, for myself, I know that as a queer South Asian woman, I know that if black transgender women of color are free in this country, I’m definitely going to be free. So I think if you can support solutions that allow the most vulnerable and the most marginalized populations to have safety, have stability, to thrive, to have dignity, then that is the way to lift all boats. In fact, sometimes looking to those populations for some of the solutions is very smart, because many times the people that live their lives at the sharpest crosshairs of race, class, gender, colonization, oppression see with greater clarity than anyone the path that we can all travel to get to freedom. I think we see that, even in the case of black women in this country.
Black women are really unparalleled in terms of demographic groups for their moral and political clarity. I mean, they vote down hate more consistently at the ballot box and are clearer and more progressive on most issues than any other demographic group. So I think there’s also a way in which all of us – white women, white people, other people of color – also can lean in and open our ears towards the folks that we should be putting at the center who have a lot of wisdom about how to lead us out of this.
There is so much brilliant work happening across the country. There’s an opportunity for folks to become a part of building a multi-racial community where we can practice what it means to heal a lot of the core wounds that were part of what this country was founded on.
NOTE: This is an excerpted and edited version of the transcript of a session held at the Bioneers Conference in May 2022, in which Bioneers Senior Producer J.P. Harpignies interviewed Professor Lawrence Rosenthal.
Lawrence Rosenthal, Ph.D., is Chair of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, which he founded in 2009. His work has appeared in numerous publications including the Nation, the International New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Foreign Policy, and many others. He co-edited Steep: The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party and The New Nationalism and the First World War; and is the author of Empire of Resentment: Populism’s Toxic Embrace of Nationalism.
J.P. Harpignies
J.P. HARPIGNIES: A very influential text in my life has been The Art of War, the oldest known manual of military strategy, attributed to a 6th Century BCE Chinese general, Sun Tzu. One of the main overarching themes of that work is that if you want to be successful in a conflict, you need to: know yourself, know the opponent as well as yourself, and know the terrain. Knowing yourself means having a really good sense of your own strengths, weaknesses and capacities. Knowing the opponent as well as yourself means having the same deep understanding as regards to your adversary, and knowing the terrain in a military sense means knowing the actual physical terrain, but in a political rather than a military context, it means understanding deeply the ideological, cultural, economic and historical features of the nation or region in which a political struggle is being waged.
And I feel that the progressive left in this country has in general done an extremely bad job of understanding the right, of understanding the ideological opposition. And that may be one reason that we seem to find ourselves on what currently appears to be a sort of slow conveyor belt to authoritarianism.
One of the most important organizations attempting to remedy that lack of understanding is the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies led by Professor Lawrence Rosenthal. It’s the only such center anywhere in any major American university. Professor Rosenthal founded it in 2009, and unfortunately, his area of expertise is in great demand at the moment.
Obviously, the risk of a right-wing takeover is on so many people’s minds, and it’s being widely discussed in progressive and centrist media, but one problem is that even though so many historians and pundits are talking about it, I’m not seeing very many genuinely realistic approaches to preventing it.
But Lawrence, what drew you to devoting so much of your intellectual life to the study of the right?
Lawrence Rosenthal
LAWRENCE ROSENTHAL: Troy Duster, a brilliant thinker who has had a great influence on me, says: “Scratch a body of work and you’ll find autobiography.” To some extent that’s true in this case. I spent some time living in Italy as a young man, and I was really interested in the place. I became struck by the fact that this country I loved, an immensely humane place where I really enjoyed life and felt at home, had invented fascism (it’s an Italian word).
Back in the 1920s, they had dressed in black, gotten in the back of pickup trucks and gone into the countryside, lynched socialist mayors, poured castor oil down the throats of union members and destroyed whatever socialist infrastructure existed. I wanted to try to understand the point of view of the people who had done this, and I continue to be motivated by wanting to understand what’s going on in these sorts of movements.
JP: Can you talk a little bit more about Italy, including what’s happening there today and what it might tell us about our own politics, since that Italian experience was so formative for your work.
LAWRENCE: In Italy, from the end of World War II to the early ‘90s, there were mostly two dominant parties, the Christian Democrats on the center-right and the Communists (which was somewhat similar to post-war France), but that somewhat stable decades-old dynamic started to break down in the 80s, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Silvio Berlusconi, a charismatic if vulgar, hustling businessman who was the richest man in Italy and owned nearly all the private TV in the country, emerged in the early ‘90s, putting together a populist political party, Forza Italia, that filled the political void. There are many ways in which he foreshadowed Trump: blatant lying, womanizing, the love of wealth, shameless corruption, etc.
But Berlusconi’s brand of populism, starting in roughly 2010 with the rise of immigration as a major issue in Italy and Europe in general, mutated into a more intense nationalist populism, and new actors with closer historical ties to fringe fascist parties emerged, including Matteo Salvini, who was rabidly anti-immigration and prevented ships with desperate migrants from landing at ports when he was Interior Minister. (Editor’s note: and now, since this discussion was held, another political figure with ties to historically fascist parties, Giorgia Meloni, has become Italy’s first far-right leader since Benito Mussolini)
That transition in the thrust of populism was mirrored in this country, so that the populism that had this huge burst during the Obama years, as manifested in the Tea Party, had a definite racist aspect but was above all defined by a sort of anti-government regulation, Koch brothers-style of libertarian capitalism, similar to Berlusconi’s free-wheeling, free market, anything goes to get rich ideology. That mutated into a much more “America First” strain of nationalism far more focused on rabid opposition to immigrants that Trump capitalized on and rode into the White House.
That transition of contemporary populism to a far more intensely nationalistic form has, in fact, been happening all over the world: in Turkey, India, Hungary, Brazil, Russia, etc. The triumph of Brexit in Britain was part of the same international zeitgeist, and it has had the wind in its sails for the last 10 years or so.
JP: Why do you think that transition occurred? Why did so many working-class people who used to vote for the left in Europe or Democrats in the U.S. or the Congress Party in India become rabid nationalist populists?
LAWRENCE: There are basically two points of view on this rise. One is economic and the other is what you could call cultural. A huge study of the 2016 election run by the Gallup organization that spoke to 80,000 people discovered that the likelihood of being a Trump voter in 2016 was directly proportional to the absence of immigrants in your life or anywhere around you. I call it the imagined or “imaginary other.”
On the economics side of things, yes, there has been an increasing immiseration of the American working class and increasingly the middle class as well, since about 1973, and that wave crested and broke in 2008 with the financial crisis, which really boosted that populism around the world. The right wing very effectively uses social media to take advantage of the vulnerability of alienated people who feel dispossessed. And their worldview seems on the surface to offer a powerful alternative to the failures of the “neo-liberal” economic system because, while one would think the economic crisis of global capitalism would boost the left, this populist worldview had an element the left lacked: intense resentment.
That is why I called my book Empire of Resentment. The motivation of this rising movement, which Trump understood, is above all resentment, which is anger, but anger with a direction. It’s anger that’s directed at those you perceive as being above you, those you perceive as an elite. It’s in contrast to contempt, which is anger that’s directed down to the people you see as lesser than yourself. And in the history of this country, resentment has been the prime mover of populist politics.
There is also a history of left populism in America, and there is some resentment toward elites on the left as well, but the resentment on the left has historically been aimed at financial elites, whereas on the right the rage is directed at cultural elites whom they perceive as people who think know better than us and are trying to tell us how we should live, and that anger seems to be sharper, more emotionally intense and easier to mobilize than anger aimed solely at economic inequality.
The fact is that the center left did not successfully mount an alternative to neo-liberalism. Bill Clinton and Obama didn’t do it, and it’s not clear to me that there was a program out there that could do it because capitalism is so deeply entrenched, but it’s extraordinary that when neo-liberalism finally confronted a truly powerful adversary, it came from the nationalist right, because there is a considerable movement on the populist right which doesn’t conform to the kind of classic Koch brothers’ populism that corporations can do no wrong, especially if those corporations are viewed as “politically correct” and parts of the snobby cultural elites.
Another element that’s really important to understand about the MAGA movement and this quality of anger is that they feel that they had the presidency, they were finally going to be able to retake control, the control that should rightfully be theirs, but they lost it, and they can only come to terms with that by believing that it was taken away from them for the benefit of immigrants and people of color. They feel that they are the ones who are victims of discrimination and are disrespected.
The sense of dispossession is fundamental, and this is where it hooks back up with economic factors. You hear them say: “I was supposed to have a job and work my whole life for decent pay, you know, and I could afford to send my kids to decent schools.” That was the implicit deal the white working class assumed was normal in this country post World War II, but the breakdown of unions, of good-paying manufacturing jobs, the evolution of global financial capitalism, all contributed to dissolving that status quo, so that sense of dispossession is really strong.
And they have a strong “zero-sum” mindset: they oppose even government programs that could help them if they perceive that they are helping “others” (people of color, immigrants, etc.) too much. Expanding those people’s rights can only be understood from the point of view of taking them away from “us,” hence the very different definitions of “freedom” on the right and left. For most of us, it’s wrong for businesses to discriminate against/refuse to serve minorities, as was the case with blacks until the 1960s and now with some businesses refusing to work on, say, gay weddings. For the right, it’s the “freedom” of business owners that is being impinged upon if they are forced to serve one and all.
And that combination of resentment against cultural elites, immigrants and “others;” economic insecurity; and that deep sense of dispossession creates a potent motivator for the most militant of responses. And one of the main triggers of their rage is their hatred of what they call “political correctness,” especially the embrace of multiculturalism and of feminism. The thought that the USA is on the way to becoming a majority-minority country (as California already is) terrifies them. That’s something that Trump has shown an extraordinary capacity to understand and to use.
JP: That raises an interesting issue: Trump got 70 million votes in the 2020 election, and it wasn’t just white working-class men. The majority of white women and roughly 30% of the Hispanic electorate also voted for Trump. This seems a little broader than just the dispossessed working class. Where is this larger base of support coming from?
LAWRENCE: It does seem improbable that so many women voted for the thrice-divorced pussy grabber. It’s even more extraordinary that he has become the darling of American evangelicals. There is a widespread belief in things that seem, from an outside point of view, deeply irrational, but a lot of the resentment around feminism and multiculturalism is rooted in (mostly white) evangelical Christianity. Obviously, Trump’s commitment to putting anti-abortionists on the Supreme Court was often sufficient to garner their support, but there is a deeper, weirder aspect to it.
They’ve kind of read Trump back into the Bible, comparing him to a couple of biblical figures—David, who was deeply flawed but saved the Jews, and King Cyrus the Babylonian non-Jew who also saved the Jews. Trump seen in this light is a bringer of deliverance in spite of his peccadillos and immorality. As with these earlier figures, God, in his mysterious ways, sometimes sends someone like that to save us.
Another important factor in all this is how groups coalesce around certain identities. Identity can be formed when we feel we are part of a specific group with shared characteristics, and that identity can be intensified when we feel that our group has been oppressed or kept down. What people call the identity politics of the left generally involves movements in which women, minority populations, gay people, etc., groups that have historically been disenfranchised, demand a seat at the table. The identity formation in the populist right is the opposite: they feel that their seat at the table is being taken away, that they are being dispossessed. That second identity formation mechanism is more likely to lead you to define yourself in intense opposition to an enemy, i.e., the ones who are taking your power away. The most significant political philosopher (and he was brilliant) of Naziism was Carl Schmitt, and he argued that the first act in politics is to define the enemy, and this has proven to be a key factor in right-wing politics.
JP: There’s been a long history of right-wing movements in America. We had Rush Limbaugh-equivalents with such figures as Father Coughlin, and Lindbergh and the America First folks in the 1930s and ‘40s were Nazi sympathizers, and we had the John Birch Society in the ‘50s. And going further back there were populist movements in the 19th Century that were often racist. What makes this particular period different? What makes this particular iteration of right-wing populism particularly pernicious in your view?
LAWRENCE: I think the answer to your question is magnitude, how big it is. The political worldview that the Trumpian right stands for these days in America has been with us in its current form at least since the 1970s, including the militia right and the Christian right, which was very powerful in the ‘90s. They had consistently been at the fringes of the Republican party, but they always had power because they were the largest coherent block in Republican primaries. The Tea Party really raised primarying to an art and they began to drive the more “moderate” (or less insanely right-wing) Republicans out of office. The MAGA movement has intensified that and pushed nearly the entire party to the far-right.
The far-right of the party was always ultimately disappointed by their leaders, by Reagan, by Bush senior, even by George W. Bush (who actually, at the time, led the most conservative administration since Calvin Coolidge). They voted for the Republican party, but they never really felt that it delivered what they wanted. For the first time, with Trump, they got the sense that they were finally getting what they wanted: unbridled rage against the “politically correct” elites and feminists and immigrants, assaults against abortion rights, etc.
And Trumpism has been uniquely successful in forging alliances between Christian nationalism, white nationalism and the anti-government right (in the Timothy McVeigh/militia movement vein) and cohering these formerly mostly fringe elements into a single movement that has taken over much of the Republican Party, especially at the state level.
JP: In a number of other countries, we’ve seen a more successful complete takeover of power by the far right, in: Hungary, Turkey, Egypt, India, China, Russia, Poland to some degree, and sadly, many other countries. And here we seem to have dodged the first bullet, but the impression I get is that we’re on this slow conveyer belt heading into more authoritarian territory. Do you think that there are sufficient antibodies in our current body politic to repel this virus?
LAWRENCE: In the largest picture, if you take, say Hungary or Russia or Weimar Germany, each of those enjoyed a brief period of liberal democracy, and each of them got dispossessed by authoritarian takeovers in about 10 to 12 years’ time, but the United States has had democratic institutions (with all their failings) for about 250 years. There’s a lot more momentum and civic infrastructure to bring down here than there had been in Hungary, Poland, or Russia. I recognize that people may be surprised to hear a note of optimism from me, but I am attempting to show some versatility.
We have in our country not only the institutions of government but the institutions of what sociologists call civil society that are very powerful. There’s some irony here in that people on the left have railed for my entire lifetime, often justifiably, about the excessive power of large corporations, but some leading American corporations under pressure from their employees and much of the public have come out against the repeal of Roe vs Wade, the murder of George Floyd, etc. Major league baseball even took the all-star game out of Atlanta last year.
I think a complete authoritarian seizure of power in this country requires a much steeper climb than elsewhere. They are certainly trying. Ron DeSantis is attempting to make Florida into a mini-Hungary. He has even gone after Disney, the largest entertainment corporation in America, and he’s gone about it in a really extraordinary way, which is that he has managed to put a bill into law in the Florida legislature which takes away the privileges of a single entity. This is very much the Viktor Orbán playbook in Hungary.
We will have to see if sufficient corporate power, calculating that its interests lie in maintaining the relative stability of liberal democracy, will resist attempts at authoritarian takeovers, but one way or another they are a major force that has to be reckoned with. Add in our still existing free press/media and the whole landscape of strong civil society organizations, and it will be tough for the far right to make all the opposition go away. It will be much tougher to take over all the levers of power than it was in, say, Poland, which had liberal institutions for only a dozen years before Kaczynski and the Law and Justice Party came to power. But there is no doubt that the game is on, and there is a really fundamental difference between blue America and the current version of red America. Samuel Alito stated in the Supreme Court’s decision on Roe that the right to abortion cannot be protected because such a right is not “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition.” People in blue America have taken for granted that there is a creed, an ethic of equality at the heart of what American democracy is about, as manifested in the (obviously aspirational) language in the great documents of the 18th Century. But for Alito and the current right, it’s not the words of the Declaration of Independence that define our traditions, it’s the values and power of those who wrote it: white male Christians. That is an assertion of a fundamentally different view of what the American experiment is about.
When we think about “health,” our minds often hone in on physical-health vitals: blood pressure, temperature, heart rate. But just as our bodies have cycles and systems that require care, our minds, communities, and planet have nuances and rhythms that benefit from direction and protection. Paying mind to the health of the broader world around us can help us care for the health of the world within us, and vice versa.
At Bioneers, we have since our inception insisted on the fact that personal health is inextricably linked to the health and vitality of our ecosystems, communities, and larger societies, something we expressed in one of our very first Bioneers books in 2004, Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves.
The ideas and stories below touch on health as it applies to the micro as well as the macro, featuring Daily Acts Founder Trathen Heckman, planetary health scientist Samuel Myers, and medical professor and Faculty Director of the Do No Harm Coalition Rupa Marya.
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“It’s easy for people to be aware of an overwhelming array of problems across the planet. But where we should spend most of our time is in our circle of influence. When we do this, we build power, skill, confidence, connections, and momentum to influence bigger things. When you have a really strong compass and set of personal practices and focus on the things you can positively influence, you are able to hold more of the hurt, confusion, and complexity that come with seeking to affect wider collective change. To transform bigger systems, the awareness and beliefs or paradigm of the people in those systems must change, and this starts with us. It’s an important link between personal and community transformation.”
Take Heart Take Action: Deepening into Self and Community
“Near thirty years into finding and living my inspiration and supporting this in others as a vehicle for bigger change, there is no way to overstate the importance of developing a daily self-renewal practice. Living in a time of rapid change, our physical and mental health is under enormous daily strain. From constant work and technological inundation to the toxic barrage of chemicals in everything, we are not equipped or skilled to stay healthy and sane, let alone contribute our best. It’s tough for many to get through the day, let alone find and stick to routines that help us hear and embody our light and insights.”
In Take Heart, Take Action, Daily Acts Founder Trathen Heckman shares how to be a catalyst for significant positive change.
Samuel Myers, MD – Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves
Samuel Myers, a leading figure in the study of the impacts on human health of the accelerating disruptions to Earth’s natural systems, shares the guiding principles and implications of this newly emergent, rapidly growing field, recently dubbed “Planetary Health.” Every dimension of human health and well-being is under threat from our ongoing degradation of Earth’s life-support systems. Planetary Health research is providing rigorous evidence that urgently stabilizing our planet’s natural systems is essential if we are going to have any chance of safeguarding a livable future for humanity. Dr. Myers explains the goals and work of the broad global coalitions around The Planetary Health Alliance (of which he is the founding director) coming together to drive home the inextricable links between human and environmental health and to develop policies and actions to protect our biosphere.
Social Medicine: Restoring Public Health by Changing Society | Dr. Rupa Marya
We are told that our personal health is our individual responsibility based on our own choices. Yet, the biological truth is that human health is dependent upon the health of nature’s ecosystems and our social structures. Decisions that negatively affect these larger systems and eventually affect us are made without our consent as citizens and, often, without our knowledge. Dr. Rupa Marya, Associate Professor of Medicine at UC San Francisco, and Faculty Director of the Do No Harm Coalition, says “social medicine” means dismantling harmful social structures that directly lead to poor health outcomes, and building new structures that promote health and healing.
EVENT: Better Balance: Imagining equity among humanity and the natural world
Leading environmental and social activists, Bioneers Co-Founder Nina Simons, Nalleli Cobo, Lyla June, and Jerry Tello, consider balance, or lack thereof, between humanity and nature; wealth and health; profit and the environment and how the themes depicted in World Wall: A Vision of the Future Without Fear can be utilized as a catalyst for social change.
This free event takes place on December 4 in Los Angeles.
Nurturing hope during times of small- and large-scale unrest can feel like an enormous undertaking. When the world around us is underwater, staying afloat is an accomplishment in and of itself. During times like these, are there ways in which we can contribute meaningfully, build power, and rise to the challenges before us?
Trathen Heckman, the founder of the action-inspiring nonprofit Daily Acts, believes our greatest power for transformation may lie in our closest communities, in small daily acts of courage and conviction, in small groups of unstoppable world-changers, and small gardens that revitalize communities and reconnect us to nature’s operating instructions. In his new book, Take Heart, Take Action (read an excerpt here), Trathen discusses how individuals and communities can be a catalyst for significant positive change.
We caught up with Trathen to discuss his book, philosophy for hope and action, and what he’s working on now.
Trathen Heckman
Bioneers: Why did you write Take Heart, Take Action?
Trathen: In a dark and stormy world, we need bright beacons and a good compass to guide us. The stories and tools in Take Heart, Take Action show how small acts and groups can make a big difference.
I also wanted to answer two questions I get asked a lot. How has a small group like Daily Acts created so much positive change through all manner of crisis and difficulty? And how do I stay so inspired and engaged after decades of navigating such challenging terrain?
As people, organizations, and movements rise to this moment and prioritize nurturing networks, regenerating ecosystems, and unleashing the power of community, the small, engaged groups in every place are essential. Your daily acts are essential.
This book is an ode to the reverent, resilient, and irrepressible spirit in each of us, and in the small groups everywhere who change things for the better time after time. I hope people, groups, and communities will get more inspired and empowered to both rise to the moment and sustain for the long haul.
Bioneers: During times of unrest or misfortune, many people find themselves feeling incapable or uninterested in taking even small steps to better their lives or the world around them. Do you have any advice for moving beyond this hesitation?
Trathen: Three things, which form the focus and flow of the book:
First, start with your heart and what inspires you. Inspiration is a natural motivator.
Second, really claim the power of your daily actions. Starting small feels more doable, thus removing barriers to action. As Charles Duhigg writes in the Power of Habit, “Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.” The irony of this big planetary moment is that while our efforts can feel inconsequential, there has never been a time when our small acts and groups have mattered more.
Lastly, create and nurture community however you can. This is how nature sustains the web of life.
The simple steps of starting with our hearts and reclaiming the power of our actions in a way that cares for life’s relations seems like a pretty infallible approach. Said another way, following your interests to find your passion and contribute your gifts to a larger cause helps you tap into the deepest intrinsic drivers of human motivation. And it feels damn good.
Bioneers: What brings you hope? On a deeper level, there’s a real question right now of whether humanity can be saved from its own self-destructive tendencies. Do you believe that we can get ourselves out of this mess, and if so, what gives you that sense?
Trathen: Like many, I’ve had my heart break countless times in this work. That said, even with the survival of humanity and a lot of other species on the line, there is a lot that brings me hope. Not hope as in a blind faith that our problems will solve themselves. It’s hope, as an inspired state of living, taking action that matters and meets one’s needs while tapping into the regenerative powers of the earth. It’s hope as an embodied, engaged commitment to claim whatever agency you have to be the change you seek, here and now.
I see so much transformation happening in the grassroots, local governments and wider social movements. I see change agents in all systems and at all scales who are waking up and taking urgent action. Whether it will be enough is a different question. We just have to dream bigger, bolder, and more collaboratively and get to work at regenerating the hell out of it all. For me, it’s about keeping a balance between inspiration and urgency without losing one’s sense of eternity or the magic and mystery of a world made of the dust and stuff of stars, in a galaxy that spirals like your blood and bones.
Bioneers: In your experience, where do humans struggle the most in their pathways toward discovery & positive productivity?
Trathen: I think we’ve lost the truth of who we are. Most folks no longer feel a meaningful, consistent connection to their power, to community, and to this living, breathing planet.
It’s also easy for people to be aware of an overwhelming array of problems nowadays. But where we should spend most of our time is in our circle of influence. When we do this, we build power, skill, confidence, connections, and momentum to influence bigger things. With a strong compass, good personal practices, and a steady focus on things you can positively influence, you are able to hold more of the hurt, confusion, and complexity that comes with seeking to affect wider collective change. To transform bigger systems, the awareness of the people in those systems must change, and this starts with us. This is an important link between personal and community transformation.
Bioneers: Much of your book focuses on intention, breath, meditation, personal habits. Have you encountered critics who say this pathway doesn’t reflect enough urgency, considering the urgency of the world’s challenges?
Trathen: Take Heart, Take Action is laid out in four sections – Reverence, Ripples, Relationships and Resilience. These are Daily Acts Organization’s four core values and operating principles. Whether at an individual or group scale, they function as a sequential framework. The first half of the book is focused more on personal stories and practices, because change starts with us. The second half looks at how you apply these strategies at an organizational, coalition, or community scale with examples from Daily Acts’ work and numerous coalitions and collaborative efforts. It’s about taking heart and taking action together, aligning many partners and communities to affect bigger transformations.
What we’ve long sought to show is the impact you can achieve through a Be the Change approach. Whether it’s mobilizing hundreds of gardens, launching new collaboratives in response to drought and fire, or helping move a city from climate laggard to state and national leader, the results usually speak for themselves. There are many challenges, of course. But aren’t there always when dealing with humans? That’s why we joke that ecosystem restoration is the easy part. The real work is in the egosystem restoration. It’s why we take a lead-from-within approach to affecting bigger collective change.
Bioneers: How can people get a copy of your book and support Daily Acts’ work?
Trathen: If you are ready for a good read or inspired to support our work, you can get a copy of our book and donate to our Take Heart, Take Action Crowdfunding Campaign until November 14th. You can also visit www.dailyacts.org. But most importantly, as we say at Daily Acts, take heart, take part, take action. It’s time to rise.
Every day there is a better world being born and a world that is rapidly unraveling. Which world do your actions feed? Are you ready to rise up and be the change you seek? Even an act as small as tending your garden or joining a local group contributes to a rising tide of positive change. In Take Heart, Take Action, Daily Acts Founder Trathen Heckman shares how to be a catalyst for significant positive change.
In Chapter 1 of Take Heart, Take Action, Heckman shares the story of a trip to Ecuador in which he learned to become more connected to the intricacies of the world around him. The following is excerpted from the book’s second chapter.
A couple of months before Ecuador, I competed in an X Games-like Big Air contest where thousands of people would come to hear music and watch snowboarders hurl through the air off a ginormous jump. Seared into my mind and emotions from that day was watching a rider hit the jump, spin through the air, and disappear. He was off in his rotation in the wrong way at the wrong time. Hearing later that he broke his back and wouldn’t walk again, I thought of countless close calls I’d had. Was any of it worth dying or being paralyzed?
As much as I loved snowboarding and the mountains, it was time to step away. For two years, I immersed in nature and travel, following my inspiration and growing more aware and connected to myself and the world around me. Leaving the mountains to focus on my wellbeing felt linked to this growing question of my direction in life. Eventually I moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area to reconnect with friends and to focus on my health and a new relationship with Mary, whom I had a serious crush on since college, and would later marry.
Stillness in Motion
I had a lot of physical healing to do from two years of snowboarding, and I wanted to get more present in my body and life, which drew me to Tai chi. This created an entirely new foundation of health, healing, and awareness upon which everything else is now built. It’s how I’m better able to center in my heart and make the most of life’s moments while navigating whatever difficulty shows up in life and leadership.
Just as sports like snowboarding and being immersed in nature can wake something in us, weaving together a unique expression of connection to season and place, movement arts like Tai chi and yoga can deepen our self-awareness, opening up a whole new terrain of inner exploration. While it takes focus to twist, flip, and flow down a snow-covered mountain, tuning into how energy moves through your body and how your body moves through the landscape of life has its own flow-filled, joyful, and invigorating experiences. Training in mindfulness and concentration can help navigate the complexities of daily living with greater awareness, joy, and ease.
Having a mind/body/movement practice is an essential tool for finding and living your inspiration. It’s vital support for health, self-care, and even processing the hurt in our lives and world. Movement arts teach us about the power of small, as even a modest external motion can penetrate deeply to unlock trauma via bodywork or physically launch a person across the room in a fight or training. Both examples are about what’s happening below the surface—the level of integration and alignment in your body.
Author Trathen Heckman
Near thirty years into finding and living my inspiration and supporting this in others as a vehicle for bigger change, there is no way to overstate the importance of developing a daily self-renewal practice. Living in a time of rapid change, our physical and mental health is under enormous daily strain. From constant work and technological inundation to the toxic barrage of chemicals in everything, we are not equipped or skilled to stay healthy and sane, let alone contribute our best. It’s tough for many to get through the day, let alone find and stick to routines that help us hear and embody our light and insights.
Simply begin with your breath. Whether your aim is happiness, spiritual insight, or leading well in tough times, everything starts with a breath. It’s claiming that instant between life’s harsh impacts and how we react. Do we respond to challenges with fear, contraction, and unconscious reaction, or do we breathe and mindfully choose our response? Having a daily practice that roots us in the present moment to process what is difficult and center in who we seek to be and how we want to respond to life’s challenges is essential.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Viktor E. Frankl
A favorite Gandhi quote that helps in this regard is: “I’m so busy today I’m going to meditate TWICE AS LONG.” Sit with this enough, and it will change you. Taking the time to increase our awareness of body and breath anchors us in the moment, strengthens our immunity, and makes us more effective at whatever we’re trying to accomplish. Doing so daily creates the space to be, to meditate on life and our motivations, and to look at what’s working and what’s not. It can provide the fortitude to keep asking the big questions and relentlessly living the answers that come, turning your inspiring references into reality. What once jolted me alive through words on a wall and a cup of mountaintop tea have become daily routine and ritual. As Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “Peace is every step.” It must be continually renewed.
Inspiration is what flows through us when we are tuned in to the materials and the moment. Staying in touch with this animating force is fuel for the long work of following our path. It’s the paradox of finding freedom in focus, doubling down on what grows us whole, especially when busyness takes hold. As one day leads to the next, spring turns to summer, fall, and another cycle around the sun, it’s reassuring to know that every cell in our body is replaced every seven years.
With each day’s waking, why not root into connection to nature and call in the wisdom of your references—the people and places that inspire you most? In a noisy, chaotic world, the subtle intoxication of long, deep breaths and fully felt steps is grounding and centering, bringing more flow and a richer experience to each moment. As Zen Buddhist Shunryu Suzuki taught, follow your breath to not lose yourself.
It Takes a Village
In addition to following our passions and developing a practice, we need good mentors and models. Simply being repeatedly exposed to excellence, to others who are living their genius powerfully impacts what we hold possible. An easy way to elevate your joy, performance, and impact is community. It’s having a place to show up for support and connection, to put what we’ve learned into action. On the healing front, groups can be powerful in holding and transmuting sorrow and despair and in helping us step into our power.
In the Sierra Nevada, I had an amazing community of folks, always pushing each other to the next level. With Tai chi, a similar network of friends evolved to provide support, learning, and encouragement. The same is true for each significant moment or success in this book, from personal action to growing regenerative gardens, high-impact groups, and city-scale transformations.
On the path from passion to purpose, our focus grows from self-interest to include the interests of others. While finding our path requires greater self-awareness and self-focus, it’s about self as service, or selfish altruism. Though “selfish” and “altruism” seem like a contradiction, the more you give, the more you get. This means questioning our instincts about how we act in community and with things we value. In a culture that largely values personal accumulation and wealth, it’s remembering the importance of valuing the collective over the individual.
Given our planetary situation, this is literally a matter of survival. Thankfully we are wired to share. The perks of sharing range from greater health to personal happiness, as oxytocin is released in our brains, which relieves stress, improves immune function, and increases feelings of well-being. Sharing builds the trust and cooperation at the heart of flourishing communities, while invoking a feeling of gratitude and happiness.
We are deeply influenced by who and what we are surrounded by. Creating conditions conducive to following our bliss like traveling, learning, finding new reference points, and tuning into breath and body are vital to finding and following one’s path. Who and what inspires you? Who embodies values or a way of being in the world that speaks to you? What steps do you need to take? What difficulties and discomfort do you need to pay attention to? Even the pain of breaking bones and breaking up can wake us to what’s missing, to deepening our path and finding our greatest joy and contribution. We have teachers all around us. But we have to give up having all the answers and learn to look, listen, and ask for support.
Live for What Matters
What a difference a move and a few months can make. I was immersed in the movement arts, had insightful roommates, and was mending from broken ribs (one reason why I stepped away from snowboarding), and a recent breakup. At work, even in a more enlightened corporate culture, it didn’t take long to be reminded that I didn’t fit there. Having gotten used to the freedom of following my own path, waking to nature connection, and leaning into our planetary problems, making a better shopping experience as a software programmer was a far cry from whatever it was that I could contribute to the world. Like my first round in tech, I struggled with a growing knowledge that this wasn’t right. Until Paige intervened.
I think Paige was the first person I met at my new job. Full of warmth and positivity, she was a coworker who quickly become a dear friend. Like Sark’s words, Paige had a vitality to her that showed up in most everything she did. She was in her twenties, had recently gotten engaged to her long-time boyfriend, and was full of vision, verve, and things to do. Then she got sick. One minute she was full of life, and the next she was gone. I was crushed, confused, and suddenly felt vulnerable. I had never lost anyone my age. The last time I saw her, she told me to live for what matters, to do it now, and not to wait. With the urgency of suddenly recognizing that life was precious and fleeting, I quit my job, this time leaving the corporate world for good.
Trathen Heckman – The Power of Small for Big Transformations (video) | In a world on fire with multiple, epochal crises, how do we nurture hope, build power and contribute meaningfully? How do we catalyze and sustain the personal and collective transformations this immense planetary challenge calls for? Though the problems seem larger than life, our greatest power may in fact lie in our closest communities, in small daily acts of courage and conviction, in small groups of unstoppable world-changers, and small gardens that revitalize communities and reconnect us to nature’s operating instructions. Trathen Heckman delivered this talk at the 2020 Bioneers Conference, introduced by Kenny Ausubel.
Ripples of Community Resilience: Small Acts, Big Change | Trathen Heckman and Jessie Lerner (podcast) | In neighborhoods across the country, citizens are building community resilience – one shovelful and one backyard at a time. Visionary citizen restorationists Trathen Heckman of Daily Acts and Jessie Lerner of Sustain Dane show how seemingly small acts like catching rain and growing food forests are turning green visions into action, with the help of local governments, students, businesses, artists and churches.
Panel Discussion – The Power of Community: Aligning Governments and Grassroots for Urgent Climate Action (video) | The climate change ship has left the harbor, and what confronts us is the urgent need to accomplish multiple goals simultaneously: reducing and then eliminating greenhouse gas pollution; rapidly scaling up drawdown efforts by returning carbon to the soil; and building the resilience and adaptive capacity in our societal systems to face the multi-pronged crises coming our way. And we must do it all with an equity lens at the center. It’s a tall order, but it’s non-optional. Luckily, there are people and projects all over the country and the world providing effective pathways forward for integrated climate action, using “whole problem” approaches. By leveraging collaboration across multiple sectors, these visionary leaders are outlining revolutionary blueprints for the next wave of essential work we need to do.
In this time of radical upheaval and change, fulfilling the promise of a “more perfect union” in the United States means building a multi-racial democracy through transformative solidarity. As the Founder-in-Residence at Policy Link, Professor Angela Glover Blackwell has spent decades advancing racial and economic equity at the national and local levels. She says the fate of the wealthiest nation on Earth depends on what happens to the very people who’ve been left behind.
Featuring
Angela Glover Blackwell, one of the nation’s most prominent, award-winning social justice advocates, is “Founder-in-Residence” at PolicyLink, the organization she started in 1999 to advance racial and economic equity that has long been a leading force in improving access and opportunity in such areas as health, housing, transportation, and infrastructure. The host of the “Radical Imagination” podcast and a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, Angela, before PolicyLink, served as Senior Vice President at The Rockefeller Foundation and founded the Urban Strategies Council. She serves on numerous boards and advisory councils, including the inaugural Community Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve and California’s Task Force on Business and Jobs Recovery.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Kenny Ausubel
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris
This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast
Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast
Transcript
Neil Harvey, Host: In this episode, Professor and policy advocate Angela Glover Blackwell shows how equity is good for everyone. In this time of radical upheaval and change, fulfilling the promise of a “more perfect union” in the United States means building a multi-racial democracy through transformative solidarity. The fate of the wealthiest nation on Earth is dependent on what happens to the very people who’ve been left behind.
I’m Neil Harvey. This is “Toward a More Perfect Union: Unleashing the Promise in Us All”.
Angela Glover Blackwell: I want to talk about how lucky we are to be alive, to be adults, to be in tuned, to be functioning right now, because this is the most amazing moment I have seen, that everything is on the table and causing us to have to think hard about things that we often pay very little attention to.
Host: When professor and equity policy advocate Angela Glover Blackwell says everything is on the table, the context is that the tables are turning.
When engineers prototype a machine, they run it at high speed and high stress to see what blows out – to find the flaws. These days, as Bob Dylan put it, “everything is broken.” What feels like a permanent five-alarm emergency is a civilizational stress test.
Our institutions are woefully not designed to manage the scale, scope and complexity of the wicked problems that bedevil us. In most cases, they’re actually causing the crises.
We’re living through an epic time of radical transformation – of breakdown and breakthrough. It opens up the space for authentic metamorphosis. To paraphrase Carl Jung, there’s a “changing of the gods,” a reset of the basic values, principles, symbols and structures of civilization. Everything is on the table.
Angela Glover Blackwell believes that for the United States to fulfill its original democratic promise, it requires unleashing the promise in us all to create a more perfect union. She says there’s actually a whole lot of popular agreement on the issues that really matter, and the stress test is causing us to question everything, which is where this story starts.
She spoke at a Bioneers conference…
Angela Glover Blackwell: We have had to think hard about democracy, something that we just thought was there. We didn’t think that it could be given up, didn’t think that it could be seriously threatened, didn’t know how fragile it actually was, but we’re having to face that.
We’ve had to reflect on institutions that have always been around and we thought they always would be around. We thought that they function the way that they function because they had to. We didn’t realize how much of the functioning of our institutions was because of custom, because of respect, because of habit. We had no idea.
We’ve had to think about all of these things, and we’re at a moment where history will look back, the future will look back, our ancestors will look back and they’ll say either that’s when they absolutely started on the road to getting it right, or that was the beginning of it all being lost. You are living through that moment, and we are not without agency. We are not without agency.
Host: As the Founder-in-Residence at Policy Link, Angela Glover Blackwell has spent decades advancing racial and economic equity at the national and local levels. That work has been a leading force in “lifting up what works” in sectors such as housing, transportation, infrastructure and public health.
When the Covid pandemic began convulsing society in early 2019, she saw how dramatically it laid bare what so many equity advocates had been highlighting for so very long: Public health was dangerously vulnerable because we were not investing in the health of us all.
Angela Glover Blackwell: It laid bare that what people had been saying about the baked-in nature of racism had just permeated throughout every institution, whether they were work institutions or educational institutions, or safety institutions. Whatever they might be, racism had been deeply embedded.
George Floyd’s murder caused us to have to face that. And part of the reason we faced it is because we all saw it. It was the first time in decades that we had had a moment like when the sit-ins were happening and everybody saw the SNCC and other young people being brutalized by the police, by dogs, by hoses, because we only had three channels. The same thing was on all the channels. Because we were all home and we were glued to our TV, we saw the murder of George Floyd over and over and over again. And whatever prejudice or bias or ignorance, we were taken into viewing it. It was clear what we were seeing, and there was no getting away from it.
It also was the time in which we saw that, for many people, racial superiority is more important than democracy, and that was a tough one. That was a tough one. But when we saw what happened on January 6th, there was no question that people were willing to sacrifice belief in a political voting system that really came to the conclusion that a multi-racial majority was putting someone into the White House. That was illegitimate in and of itself.
So here we are with all of these things causing us to think, to study, to talk to our friends and neighbors and strangers about things that we never talked about before. And what we can do if we get it right is absolutely extraordinary, because we really cannot create a thriving multi-racial democracy if we don’t understand it, if we don’t know its history. We really cannot create a thriving multi-racial democracy if we don’t see the extraordinary asset that our difference is. It is so essential that we lay out a marker for where it is that we want to get to, and we develop a plan for how we’re going to get there.
Host: As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary since the July 4th 1776 Declaration of Independence, the nation faces a stark reckoning. Angela Glover Blackwell believes that fulfilling that founding promise of equal rights for everyone was aspirational. Now is the moment of truth to deliver on it.
Angela Glover Blackwell: I think it’s going to really require us to be able to take our beautiful and exciting multi-racial coalition and realize that starting in this country, that that coalition is the natural heir of the framers of the nation when they sat down to form a more perfect union, to be able to do something that actually it’s taken me a little time to come to, and let me confess that.
Because I will tell you as a black person growing up in this country, and I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, I was not feeling it. I was not. I was not feeling it. Like what is the big deal about these founders? And then as I learned more about them and started reading their biographies, and hearing history that’s told in more honest ways, but I will tell you is I have studied democracy, and as I have studied those founding documents, it is clear to me that the framers punched way above their moral weight. They punched way above their moral weight. And once you realize that, you can accept extraordinary ideas, even if they come from people who were deeply flawed.
And so as I think about the… the opportunity that we have now, it is just so clear that what we’re going to have to do is own that we are the heirs to something that’s very special, and the work is really hard, because now we really can create a democracy that works for all.
Host: Like the concurrent French Revolution, the American Revolution resounded around the world with its vision of equal rights and democracy. It captured the world’s imagination of the possible.
Yet as powerful and catalytic as that narrative has been, the real history is way more complicated. Its burdens continue to haunt the nation, but Glover Blackwell says we must unearth it, learn from it and reconcile it.
Angela Glover Blackwell: The United States of America is a nation that was founded on genocide for the purpose of stealing land, and human bondage for the purpose of slave labor. This theft of land and theft of labor is the basis upon which the country was built, and in order to be able to justify that, there was developed a hierarchy of human value, and that hierarchy of human value, not just justified, but it then got baked into every institution, that when you think about how it functioned, one of the things that is just starkly true when you think about it is that the dehumanizing relationship that formed the black/white paradigm during slavery, that dehumanized the slave and dehumanized the owner, created a paradigm that actually defined the way that oppression and repression would take place.
And that black/white paradigm was defining, it was embedded, it is continuing, it is also inadequate to be able to fully understand the status of everybody who is oppressed. But everybody who was oppressed is oppressed within the context of that paradigm. So we have to go back and study that history and understand that history. We can’t go forward without it. It’s essential. I know it is uncomfortable. I know it is hard to talk about race. I know that just by lifting up the black/white paradigm it raises a million questions: What about what happened with Indigenous People and continues to happen? What about what happens to people who are Latinx and Asian? What about what happens to people with disabilities, who are transgender, people who are white and poor, all of the people who you can think of oppressed? How can I ignore that and lift up the black/white paradigm? Because the protocols of oppression were developed in that unnatural relationship, and we’ve got to face it. We’ve got to understand it. We have to analyze it. We have to see how it goes forward.
But the next thing we have to do is that we have to understand that addressing these wrongs, while it is the right thing to do, it is the moral thing to do, it is the only way to be able to go forward; that if we don’t develop a way to be able to tap into the assets that are the people who make up the country, who make up the world, the country and the world will not flourish. They will not survive. They will not tap the resources that are needed.
The fate of the nation is dependent on the very people who have been left behind.
Host: Angela Glover Blackwell points to the seismic demographics. Since 2012, the majority of all babies born are of color. By 2030, the majority of young workers will be of color. By 2044, the US population will be majority people of color.
The tables are turning, but will they turn toward a more perfect union that unleashes the promise in us all?
More when we return. I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to The Bioneers…
You can visit bioneers.org to subscribe to our newsletters and podcasts, check out Deep Dives on the topics that matter to you most, and learn about our conferences. That’s bioneers.org
Although the media and political narrative is that the US is hopelessly polarized and divided, a majority of polls consistently show that a vast majority of Americans strongly support the same goals: Universal healthcare, access to free education, a living wage, paid family leave, climate action, environmental protection and other policies and programs that invest in people, communities and the public good.
Yet next to nothing gets done. Why? Greedlock. As the musician Wynton Marsalis puts it, when it comes to holding the people in power accountable, “Keep your eyes on the cash register, not the people staging the fight in the store.” Again, Angela Glover Blackwell.
Angela Glover Blackwell: Economic greed is just having a heyday while the media is focusing people on all of their divisions, and the more they focus on them, the more people buy into them and figure like they have to take sides and where are they on it. And all the time, greed is just taking advantage of the fact that we are not asking our government and our regulatory systems to be able to make sure that our economy is working in a way that is fair. So, a really interesting way to think about what’s going on, and it’s really disturbing when you think of the role that the media has played in distracting the American people from the real issues.
It reminds me of a story that my friend Saru Jayaraman told me with One Fair Wage that they were having a demonstration in Washington, D.C. in front of the capitol, trying to really promote the Fight for 15, increasing the minimum wage. And across the street, there was a Trump demonstration in favor of Trump and talking about “making American great again”. And a couple of people from the MAGA demonstration came over to ask the people for One Fair Wage what it was that they were there for, and they said we’re trying to make sure that low-income workers can make more money, and they said, Oh, we want that. And the MAGA people picked up a couple of the posters and marched with them. Classic example of when you stop distracting people around these, what they call cultural issues, and talk about the bread and butter issues, the American people are not that far apart, no matter what their political persuasion.
Host: One catastrophically successful part of the political narrative since the 1960s has been the relentless, reactionary drumbeat that government itself is the problem, and we need less of it.
In reality, the economic elites pounding that drum are just fine with big government – as long as its policies serve them: tax cuts for the wealthy, business deregulation, the privatization of just about everything, and cutting or terminating Social Security and Medicare.
In fact, there have been two times in modern history where bold government intervention radically improved the rights and livelihoods of Americans: Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty.
Angela Glover Blackwell reminds us that those smart, strategic government policies can be life-changing for the vast majority of the population. And what’s good for the most vulnerable and marginalized turns out to be good for just about everyone.
Angela Glover Blackwell: In 1950, 56% of black people in America lived below the official poverty level. I’m not saying were low income, lived below the poverty level. By 1980, 30% did. And it was because of programs. It was because of Head Start, it was because of increased minimum wage, it was because of investment in cities, it was because of the youth education program. All these programs that came into place, it was because of Medicaid. I mean, it was Medicare. All of these programs that came during the Great Society cut poverty vastly, not just for people who were black, for the elderly. Elder poverty was a huge problem. But, you know, we had Social Security, but it took Medicaid to really be able to make the progress that needed to be made around healthcare. Those programs made a difference and it was, I think, Ronald Reagan who said we fought a war on poverty and poverty won. Not true. Not true. We fought a war on poverty, we were making progress, and then we gave in. And we stopped.
The Vietnam War had a lot to do with it, but changing the administration to Nixon and these are the things that actually killed it because greed, again, got control of government. And when greed gets control of government, the first thing it does is convince the people that government is not your friend, we need to cut back government, we need to give that money to rich people. And that’s exactly what you do.
When you do a tax cut, you take the money from poor people, you give it to rich people. And somehow these politicians can talk the American people, at least some of them, into believing that that’s a good thing. We have so much suffering and inequality not because we don’t know what to do, we just don’t have the political will to do it.
Host: Once again, keep your eye on the cash register, not the fake fight being staged on aisle one.
When Covid paralyzed the US economy, the Covid relief package not only helped out working people with life-saving checks. In just one year, the child tax credit cut child poverty in half. Despite overwhelming public support to continue the policy, the political class refused to spend the money. Call it the democracy deficit.
But, says Angela Glover Blackwell, there’s a deeper question: the foundational distinction between equity and equality.
Angela Glover Blackwell: I first became familiar with the terms when I was the senior vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and they used equity in talking about their international development work, and equality in talking about their domestic civil rights work. And so I pulled people together and said, well, why are we using different language and what does it mean? And from the series of discussions we had, it became clear to me that equality was an input conversation that was really trying to focus on making sure that we were providing the same things for people without regard to race, or religion or gender. But that equity was an outcomes discussion.
So when I started PolicyLink, I said I think we need to focus on equity, that we need to really 1) create a big tent that lets everybody who’s working for justice, whether they’re doing litigation or community development or education or healthcare, to understand that they’re part of the same thing – equity. And we needed to have a conversation that moved away from inputs, because clearly equality is an interesting and worthy goal. We’ve never done it, but just doing equality now after decades upon decade of inequality will not get us where we want. And that’s most obvious in the education arena.
Equality in education means making sure that teachers have the same amount of training, that the kids are using similar textbooks, that they’re going to school the same amount of time. Equity says: we want to make sure all children achieve at high levels, graduate and go on and reach their full potential. And once you set that out as your goal, the inputs are bound to be different, because some children in communities where their parents have resources, where the communities are well-resourced, really all you need is a school that’s providing good education. But if you have children who are in communities where there are no recreational activities, where it is not safe to play on the streets, where parents are not coming home until very late, many parents have not had the education themselves to be able to read and do other things, that that is a different requirement that we need to have supplemental education, we need to have things in the community, teachers might need to be trained in a different way.
And so equity asks: What do you want? And backs into what it’s going to take in order to get there. Equality focuses on making sure that the inputs are the same.
Host: As the author and policy expert Heather McGhee has said, “When we underinvest because of prejudice, everybody suffers. We need a ‘we’ to survive.”
As the United States comes full circle to its aspirational founding ideals, will the “we” in “We, the people” become decisively more inclusive? Will our ancestors look back on this moment as the beginning of it all being lost, or the beginning of moving toward authentic transformation?
Angela Glover Blackwell: Equity creates more, not less. It’s just like you all have talked so much about love. Love creates more. The more you love, the more you have; the more you give, the more you get; the more you spread it, the more it exists. Equity is like that. It’s not a zero sum game. You invest in the people who are going to be the future, and the economy does better, the democracy works better, our neighborhoods are better, we’re safer in the places that we live.
We need a solidarity that actually builds on what I have been just saying, that our future collectively is dependent on all of us being able to reach our full potential. That is the definition of equity – just and fair inclusion into a society in which all can participate, thrive, and reach their full potential.
What we really have to understand is that this kind of solidarity, which I call transformative solidarity, doesn’t have you thinking that I’m going to be your ally, but it’s asking you to be mine. It’s not that I’m going to help you, you’re going to help me, we’re going to do it together, because my survival is dependent on it.
The problem with racism is not a problem for black people, it is a problem for the world, it is a problem for the nation. And so when we develop the story that is based on our history, when we make a commitment to achieving a world in which all can reach their full potential, equity, we understand that we do that because it is the right thing to do, but it is the only thing to do to be able to go forward.
And the process of doing it is one in which we join with others. We embrace their realities. We understand that our difference is our strength, it is our very best asset that we have, that by embracing it we then are in a different kind of coalition, not one that just is for the close in, but one is for the way out.
This is our moment. Everything is on the table, and it’s up to us to take advantage of it, to join together and to move forward, because we cannot unlock the promise of the nation, we cannot unlock the promise of our highest ideals until we unleash the promise in us all. Thank you. Thank you.
Bioneers is proud to announce the release of the first season of its groundbreaking new podcast, Indigeneity Conversations. In a series of six thought-provoking episodes, hosts Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) and Alexis Bunten (Unangan/Yup’ik) — Bioneers Indigeneity Program Directors — engage in conversations with Native culture bearers, scholars, movement leaders, and non-Native allies on important issues and solutions in Indian Country.
Produced by Bioneers’ award-winning media team, Indigeneity Conversations explores compelling issues such as Indigenous Land Return, Cultural Appropriation, Rights of Nature, and other essential conversations that exemplify the essential leadership role that Indigenous cultures are playing in the effort to reshape and transform society’s relationship with the natural world while highlighting the contemporary lives, work, and experiences of Native Americans.
The series also features excerpts from the Bioneers Indigenous Forum, a sovereign space and touchstone for Native leaders and non-Native allies to come together and form strategic alliances at our annual Bioneers Conference.
Season one of Indigeneity Conversations features:
Crystal Echo Hawk (Pawnee), President and CEO of IllumiNative and of Echo Hawk Consulting, in a discussion around transforming Indigenous stereotypes and the power of art to do so.
Casey Camp-Horinek (Ponca), talking about the burgeoning indigenous-led Rights of Nature movement.
Corrina Gould (Lisjan Ohlone), Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, in conversation about the genocide of California Indians and the importance of addressing that historical trauma, which caused deep wounds that still affect Indigenous Peoples today.
Julian Brave Noisecat (Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen), in an exploration of the importance of connection and relationship, to family, to history, to place, and to culture
The beautiful collage artwork for the Indigeneity Conversations Podcast Series werecreated in collaboration with the artist, Mer Young, a descendant of Chichimeca and Apache Tribe (Ndé). She is an Indigenous published multidisciplinary artist who has created a body of artwork manifested in collages, drawings, paintings, and founder of Mausi Murals public artworks. Young aims to inspire, celebrate and elevate repressed indigenous, first nations and native cultures and women of color.
The White House officially proclaimed October 11 as Indigenous Peoples’ Day in 2021. This decision to change the title of Columbus Day was an incredibly important move to shift public consciousness and address the ongoing genocide and erasure of Indigenous Peoples whose lands and resources were taken to make the country we all share today.
Our staff in the Native-led Bioneers Indigeneity Program have been personally impacted by the intergenerational effects of forced boarding schools and assimilation, the introduction of preventable diseases, displacement, and the hardly told stories of forced labor of Native peoples across the country. The following is a note from our Indigeneity Program Staff to the Bioneers Community:
“We are living in a time of deep uncertainty, but also hope for an indigenized future that our elders have taught us. They didn’t refer to the future we are shaping together as “decolonized” per se, but they recalled through oral history a time before planetary destruction due to colonial capitalism. And, they could imagine a time after it for all plants and animals to thrive on Mother Earth. The acknowledgment and celebration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day call attention to our collective histories and futures to celebrate the survival and futures of Indigenous Peoples, and all peoples.
We encourage everyone to take local actions to honor Indigenous Peoples’ Day 2022. This year, our Bioneers Indigeneity staff are excited to honor this day with our broader San Francisco Bay Area Native community. We will be bringing elders and youth together at Alcatraz on October 10 to honor and recognize those who fought for American Indian rights, for the ongoing recognition of Natives who are still here today, as well as the silenced voices of Indigenous, marginalized and war-torn peoples across the world.”
This week, we’re proud to announce the release of season one of our Indigeneity Conversations podcast. Learn more below, where you’ll also find stories from Indigenous leaders and ways you can take action to support Indigenous rights campaigns.
Sincerely,
Alexis Bunten (Unangan/Yup’ik) and Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) Bioneers Indigeneity Program Directors
Headshot artwork by Mer Young.
Bioneers is proud to announce the release of the entire first season of its groundbreaking new podcast, Indigeneity Conversations. In a series of six thought-provoking episodes, hosts Cara Romero and Alexis Bunten — Bioneers Indigeneity Program Directors — engage in conversations with Native culture bearers, scholars, movement leaders, and non-Native allies on important issues and solutions in Indian Country.
Produced by Bioneers’ award-winning media team, Indigeneity Conversations explores compelling issues such as Indigenous Land Return, Cultural Appropriation, Rights of Nature, and other essential conversations that exemplify the essential leadership role that Indigenous cultures are playing in the effort to reshape and transform society’s relationship with the natural world while highlighting the contemporary lives, work, and experiences of Native Americans.
Support Our Creation of Season 2! Help us continue to produce Indigeneity Conversations for another season by supporting Bioneers.
Indigenous Eco-Nomics: Ancestors of the Future with Nick Estes
In this episode of the Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature podcast, Indigenous scholar and organizer Nick Estes explores how Indigenous land-based and Earth-centered societies are advancing regenerative solutions and campaigns to transform capitalism. “Eco-nomics” puts Indigenous leadership at the forefront of assuring a habitable planet.
Indigenous Peoples already do “green jobs,” integrate cultural values into business activities, and protect 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity. In order to transform our economies through Indigenous-led solutions, we need to uplift movements and stories inspired by Indigenous resistance. To do this, we must change the culture of philanthropy and “impact investing,” which still largely circulates in privileged circles. In this panel, Sikowis (Plains Cree/Saulteaux), Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux Tribe), and Alexis Bunten (Unangan/Yupik) discuss colonial-capitalism and how Indigenous-led strategies can offer us a pathway toward an equitable and regenerative future.
The Rights of Nature Movement in Indian Country and Beyond: From Grassroots to Mainstream
The “Rights of Nature” movement seeks to protect rivers, mountains, and entire ecosystems and the life forms supported within them by recognizing and enshrining their rights in formal legal codes and constitutions. This legal framework offers a radically different worldview from current legal premises. Instead of being seen as property, nature as a whole and its various components would be formally recognized to have inherent rights to exist, persist, flourish and evolve, and these would be protected under the law. For over 15 years, the Rights of Nature movement has caught fire across the U.S. and the rest of the world in some of the most and least expected places, from tribal lands to “progressive” cities, to coal country, to Latin American nations. In this session, some of the activist attorneys leading the movement in Indian Country and beyond update us on their successes and the challenges ahead. With: Frank Bibeau; Thomas Linzey; Samantha Skenandore. Moderated by Alexis Bunten.
In this Wampanoag story told in a Native tradition, two children from the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe learn the story of Weeâchumun (corn) and the first Thanksgiving.
The Thanksgiving story that most Americans know celebrates the Pilgrims. But without members of the Wampanoag tribe who already lived on the land where the Pilgrims settled, the Pilgrims would never have made it through their first winter. And without Weeâchumun (corn), the Native people wouldn’t have helped.
Written by Bioneers’ Alexis Bunten along with Danielle Greendeer and Anthony Perryn, with illustrations by Garry Meeches Sr., this important picture book honors both the history and tradition that surrounds the story of the first Thanksgiving.
Bioneers Decolonization Series: What Is Decolonization?
In recent years, decolonization has become a buzzword in community organizing work. However, the political power that it holds can easily be robbed of its importance if we are not intentional with how we use it. Fostering informed intentional use of the concept first requires that we understand colonialism and history.
So, what is decolonization? Following an interview with Alexis Bunten, we explore the Indigenous history, settler-colonialism and the meaning of decolonization.
The “Rights of Nature” movement seeks to protect rivers, mountains, and entire ecosystems and the life forms supported within them by recognizing and enshrining their rights in formal legal codes and constitutions. This legal framework offers a radically different worldview from current legal premises. Instead of being seen as property, nature as a whole and its various components would be formally recognized to have inherent rights to exist, persist, flourish and evolve, and these would be protected under the law. For over 15 years, the Rights of Nature movement has caught fire across the U.S. and the rest of the world in some of the most and least expected places, from tribal lands to “progressive” cities, to coal country, to Latin American nations. In this session, activist attorneys leading the movement in Indian Country and beyond give an update on their successes and the challenges ahead. With: Frank Bibeau; Thomas Linzey; Samantha Skenandore. Moderated by Alexis Bunten.
This talk was delivered at the 2022 Bioneers Conference.
PANELISTS
Frank Bibeau, an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, is an activist and tribal attorney who works extensively on Chippewa treaty and civil rights, sovereignty and water protection, including by serving as Executive Director for the 1855 Treaty Authority, representing the White Earth Band of Ojibwe and Honor the Earth (a Native-led, nonprofit environmental protection group), and litigating to stop Enbridge’s notorious Line 3 crude oil pipeline in Minnesota.
Thomas Alan Linzey, Esq. is Senior Legal Counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER), an organization committed to advancing the legal rights of nature and environmental rights globally. Co-founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), Linzey is widely recognized as the founder of the contemporary “Community Rights” and “Rights of Nature” movements. He co-founded the Daniel Pennock Democracy School, which has trained over 5,000 lawyers, activists, and municipal officials, and is the author or co-author of several books, including: Be The Change: How to Get What You Want in Your Community; We the People: Stories from the Community Rights Movement in the United States; and the forthcoming Modern American Democracy and Other Fairy Tales.
Samantha Skenandore (Ho-Chunk/Oneida), Attorney/Of-Counsel at Quarles & Brady LLP, has vast knowledge and experience in working on matters involving on both federal Indian law and tribal law. Her extensive previous experience includes serving as a Tribal Attorney for the Ho-Chunk Nation Department of Justice and clerking for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Indian Resources Section. She currently advises tribal and corporate clients in tribal governance, governmental affairs, corporate transactions, real estate, labor issues and litigation. Samantha represents clients before members of Congress, congressional committees and agencies through federal lobbying services.
Alexis Bunten, Ph.D., (Aleut/Yup’ik), Co-Director of Bioneers’ Indigeneity Program, has been a researcher, media-maker, manager, consultant, and curriculum developer for organizations including the Sealaska Heritage Institute, Alaska Native Heritage Center, and the FrameWorks Institute. She has published widely about Indigenous and environmental issues, and is the author of So, how long have you been Native?: Life as an Alaska Native Tour Guide.
Indigenous Peoples already do “green jobs,” integrate cultural values into business activities, and protect 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity. In order to transform our economies through Indigenous-led solutions, we need to uplift movements and stories inspired by Indigenous resistance. To do this, we must change the culture of philanthropy and “impact investing,” which still largely circulates in privileged circles. In this panel, Sikowis (Plains Cree/Saulteaux), Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux Tribe), and Alexis Bunten (Unangan/Yupik) discuss colonial-capitalism and how Indigenous-led strategies can offer us a pathway towards an equitable and regenerative future.
This talk was delivered at the 2022 Bioneers Conference.
PANELISTS
Sikowis (aka Christine Nobiss) (Plains Cree/Saulteaux, George Gordon First Nation) grew up in Winnipeg but has been living in Iowa City for 16 years. She is the founder of the Great Plains Action Society, “a collective of Indigenous organizers of the Great Plains working to resist and Indigenize colonial institutions, ideologies, and behaviors.” She speaks, writes and organizes extensively on Indigenous rights, the climate crisis, environmental collapse and colonial capitalism.
Nick Estes, Ph.D. (Kul Wicasa/Lower Brule Sioux), is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico and a member of the Oak Lake Writers Society, a group of Dakota, Nakota and Lakota writers. In 2014, he was a co-founder of The Red Nation in Albuquerque, NM, an organization dedicated to the liberation of Native people from capitalism and colonialism. He serves on its editorial collective and writes its bi-weekly newsletter. Nick Estes is also the author of: Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance.
Alexis Bunten, Ph.D., (Aleut/Yup’ik), Co-Director of Bioneers’ Indigeneity Program, has been a researcher, media-maker, manager, consultant, and curriculum developer for organizations including the Sealaska Heritage Institute, Alaska Native Heritage Center, and the FrameWorks Institute. She has published widely about Indigenous and environmental issues, and is the author of So, how long have you been Native?: Life as an Alaska Native Tour Guide.
The artist, activist, and teacher Betsy Damon has focused on virtually every aspect of water during the past four decades, from the essence of water drops to whole water systems and their connections to life on earth. Over the years, she has borne witness to the decline in water quality around the world as a result of human activities.
In the book Water Talks, Damon writes about our interdependence with water in every aspect of life, discussing many of the technical, social, and ethical issues we face and our individual and communal responsibility for addressing the immanent crises we are facing. As she states, “Ignoring water’s essential role as the connective tissue of all life on Earth is widespread. Unfortunately, the response to each environmental problem tends to be piecemeal—addressing one threat rather than responding with complex solutions that will address the underlying problems.”
The following is an excerpt from Water Talks.
It can be nearly impossible to even consider being without water. The very act of noticing something that we depend on every minute of every day can be so overwhelming that the off switch of the brain says, “Not now.” To consider water’s vital role in all life and the impact on our lives is another step. We will begin to notice water together.
Each and every one of us has a water story, for we all live in a watery world. Like every human, I developed while floating in warm water, in the womb. I have a sense of floating in a warm, relaxing, and protected place where I was well-nourished. To this day, my body loves warm baths, hot tubs, and warm springs. My earliest memories are of sitting on the edge of the ocean, where waves gently lapped against the sand.
As I share a few stories of my relationship with water, you may begin to recall and tell your own.
When I was four, toward the end of World War II, my mother, brother, and I joined my father in Turkey, where he worked a nonarmy job during the war. From 1945 to 1948, we lived high in the hills outside Istanbul in a village called Rumeli Hisari. The Bosphorus, a big ribbon of salty, dark blue water that connects the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea, was always in view. One could see the tides rush up toward the Black Sea and back out again to the Mediterranean. As a six-year-old, I swam in that cold, salty water on hot summer days. With nervous excitement, I avoided the barnacles clinging to the rocky shore. I loved that rocky shore, where water-carved stones, seaweed clung to rocks, and bits of shells washed up.
Colorful boats with large sails speckled the waters as they ferried people across from the European side to the Asian side. Perched atop chimneys, large nests built by storks dotted the skyline. The storks were considered good luck, a blessing on the home. Their wide wings swooping through the sky and over the waters became a signal that all was well.
From the hills where we lived, I could see the skyline of Istanbul: glistening domes and tall minarets of mosques. Five times a day, calls for prayer reverberated over the hills and water and everyone from the farmers to wandering vendors lowered themselves to pray. Before entering a mosque, those who were going to pray dipped their fingers in the water. On every fountain and wall were beautifully patterned tiles.
The outdoors was my play space, beneath the pine trees and wisteria arbors, or sitting among the daisies, astors, and thistles in the vast meadow just outside our garden gate. Like many young people, my cherished objects were shells, stones, nuts, feathers, flowers pressed into books. Later in life, my studio was always filled with objects that I recycled into performances and sculptures.
After each day in my one-room schoolhouse, I walked home on a small path that ran through the hills to our yard. There, climbing into a fig tree, I would swing on the supple branches and sing at the top of my lungs. From that high place, I could see the Bosphorus, and would imagine swimming across her and walking to China. In the summers, freshwater shortages left us without water for weeks. We adapted by capturing rainwater in every container, filling bathtubs, pots, and pans. I vividly remember those precious pots of water; we used only what we needed to cook with, and to wash our hands and feet.
We returned to the U.S. in 1948, first to visit my grandmother in Belmont, Massachusetts. Her property contained a natural pond where a duck family returned every year to nest. During one visit, there was a geomancer—someone practicing earth divination— walking around seeking water on her property. He handed me the V-shaped stick, encouraging me to try it out. We walked around, and as we passed over some underground water, the divining rod flew out of my hands! This experience was astonishing; my mouth dropped open as I took in this mysterious energy.
We settled near Washington, D.C. Across the street from our front yard was a stream that would swell and over ow in big rainstorms, and then recede into a trickle. In the spring, tadpoles emerged at the edges of the stream and we’d scoop them up, place them in a small container, and watch as they became frogs, before returning them to their creek. Several years later, we moved to a house built on the edge of a wooded area with a creek running in the woods behind it. “Come on, guys,” I called out to my friends. “Let’s dam the creek to make a small pond!” There, rolling up our pants and tossing off our shoes, we floated a poorly made raft of branches and twigs that rapidly sank under our weight.
Gathering groups to work together was second nature for me, whether it was to build a dam, or to find a way to make swings in the woods. In the summers, we would escape the Washington, D.C. heat by traveling north to my great-grandmother’s home in the coastal town of Plymouth, Massachusetts. Vast woods surrounded her farm and gardens. My cousins and I swam in the salt water and roamed the beaches. We canoed in the Eel River estuaries among the cat-o-nine-tails, trying to catch turtles. We counted our time on the river with the tides, which rushed in and out. Being caught in an outbound tide would have dumped us in the ocean. Whether on the beach or in the estuaries, the tides determine the rhythm of the days. I would walk for hours, fascinated by the tidal waters, which cast up treasures and sculpted the sands.
On family trips across the United States, we drank from public water sources all along the way, and swam in water holes and streams. Today, it is unthinkable to drink from a stream or dip into a creek that you do not know. From the age of eighteen, I was privileged to be able to spend time at Squam Lake, a glacial lake at the base of New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Every summer, I sat under towering pines listening to the lake and the forest humming with life. The loons’ cries echoed across the waters at dawn and dusk. Diving into its cool, sweet surface refreshed me as nothing else could. I swam with loons, counted the baby ducks, and admired the old blue heron, a sentinel of the wetlands in which he fished. From a canoe, I peered at the leftovers of otters’ dinners, empty shells underwater or on rocks along the shore. Big storms darkened the skies while we rushed off the lake to safety on the shore. Late in summer, mists rose in spirals every morning, shimmering as the sun bounced off the drops. In the chilly dawn, I often forced myself to climb out of my warm bed to photograph these vortices spiraling away as the sun rose higher.
Although this lake has enjoyed the protection of some conservation laws, its water quality has declined with the increase of pollutants from new developments. In particular, fire retardants entered the waters, baby loons are rarely spotted, and fewer birds sing in the early morning. I was astonished to learn that fire retardants are manufactured into everything from clothing, to new furniture to building supplies. The chemicals were entering primarily from the new housing projects where, over time, they washed out into the land and lake. These highly toxic carcinogens are used without consideration for their impact.
A seven-week camping trip across the United States with my children in the summer would turn out to be significant in ways I never imagined. Where were the running rivers that I remembered? We encountered something unfamiliar: dry riverbeds. I knew I had never seen this on my past trips. Where were those cold streams rushing from the mountains into the lush meadows? How did so many rivers suddenly dry up? Where is the water? Those stones in the riverbeds had been washed and shaped by water for thousands of years. They reminded me of dinosaur bones found resting under a hot desert sun. At the time, I had no idea that extensive damming had dried up so many of the rivers. I imagined doing something to remind city people of the rivers that they might have forgotten, to restore their connection to their waters.
On this road trip, we unexpectedly—we were not searching for this—found our way to the first Sun Dance on the Navajo-Hopi Reservation. For four days, we witnessed the power of focused intention and prayer. We sang and drummed under a burning sun when a cloud appeared, spilling rain for five minutes out of the blue sky as the medicine man talked about the suffering of his people. The Sun Dance was a powerful, transformative experience, a specific ritual to strengthen the people and to experience suffering to gain compassion for those who are suffering. There was no separation between the dancers, the sky, the eagle, the drums, and us who chanted with them. Looking back, I realized that my vision to invite people to know about rivers originated in that experience. I cannot exactly explain how, except that it invited me to be immersed in the energies of the earth.
After returning to my loft in New York, I woke up each morning missing the trees, the simplicity of living on the earth, hearing the wind, and waking up to the dawn. This new consciousness showed up in the work that I began.
But first, to back up for a moment: Painting on canvas was my art until 1972. The sources of my new inquiries were my early morning walks with my three-year-old daughter and the feminist art movement; these worked together in not-so-obvious ways to inspire a change. I stepped out of the canvas and into public spaces with performance pieces that progressed from the personal 7000 Year Old Woman (1976) to installations such as Shrine for Everywoman at UN conferences in 1980, ’85, and ’90.
Breathing with Stones was first performed on the streets of SoHo and then in front of the American Museum of Natural History. Breathing with Stones evolved into Meditation with Stones for the Survival of the Planet at the SOHO20 Gallery every month at the full moon. Everyone who attended an event was both healed, and a healer. Participants brought their favorite stones to a full moon performance held monthly in a SoHo gallery.
We set a large blue circular cloth in the center of the room, around which everyone stood. After a gathering of energies, a small portion of the participants were invited to lie down, heads in the center. Those standing placed stones on the bodies of those lying down on the blue circle. When finished, we intoned a vocal sound over those with the stones on their bodies. Interestingly enough, participants never told each other where to place the stones, yet inevitably they placed stones where there was tension or pain.
To complete the event, each person was invited to think about the earth: what they loved about it and what they could do to save it. We ended with an invitation to place a stone in the center of the room, while stating an intention to protect or heal something on earth. This revealed that stones are powerful vehicles for healing imbued with their own energies. The wife of the famous Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji passed by the gallery and asked about the event, astonished to encounter in SoHo something she did regularly in Nigeria.
I traveled with my bags of rocks to universities and performance spaces to create these healing events. One day, the stones seemed tired, so I returned them to the earth. These stone-based performance pieces were the beginning of my exploration of the energy available to everyone, present in every detail of the earth.
In October 1983, I was invited to lead A Meditation With Stones at a conference in Canada for four hundred people. Many participants shed tears as they carried their rock to the center, along with a promise: “I will ensure that the whales, wolves, and bees survive.” While at the conference, I met a group of papermakers who invited me to join them on a road trip to Edmonton, Canada. As we sped down the highway, I asked them, “If you could do anything, and time and money were not obstacles, what would you do?” After answering, they asked me the same question. I answered, “I can’t do it, but . . . I imagine making a paper casting of a dry riverbed.” The car came screeching to a halt at the side of the road, the people in the front seat turned around and said, “You can do that, and we will help you.” At this moment, I resolved to start writing grants to secure the necessary funding. Breathing with Stones for the Survival of the Planet (1983) led me into water.
“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.. . . Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
Goethe
Thanks to the director of the Framingham Museum, I received a new works grant from the Massachusetts Council of the Arts to create a piece for the Framingham Museum. Now I needed an accessible dry riverbed with nearby housing for up to ten people. Robyn Stein enthusiastically agreed to be the project manager. Right after returning from the UN World Conference on Women in Nairobi, we flew to Denver, rented a car, and drove through Colorado and New Mexico looking at every accessible dry riverbed. The landscape was spectacular, but suitable dry riverbeds with housing nearby were rare. Robyn’s friend Lucy Wallingford recommended Castle Creek, Near Moab, Utah. Indeed, in Castle Valley, Utah, we found the perfect riverbed. Castle Creek was dry and the right size, with abundant stones carved by water.
I rented a large van and picked up the team—Coco Gordon, Robyn Stein, Denise Amses, Regina Corritore, and Helmut Becker—at the airport in Denver. With my hands trembling on the wheel, we set out and drove over the mountain and down into Moab and the 36 miles to Castle Valley. There, a local real estate man gave us a large empty house in which we slept on mats on the floor and cooked with a few pots and pans. Ray Tomasso brought his papermaking equipment from Denver. We got up early to go to the site, where Helmut began to identify the plants that would be good to gather for papermaking. Under Helmut’s guidance, we pounded these plants with rocks to the rhythm of a dance. We broke down the fiber for boiling and converted it to paper. Meanwhile, the pulp had to be reconstituted by Ray. Ceremoniously, everyone lined up to support me through the first pour of the pulp onto the riverbed.
We quickly became a team, as if breathing in unison. I led the way, choosing the colors. Coco mixed the colors and for ten to twelve hours every day, Denise Amses, Regina Corritore, Robyn Stein, and Lucy Wallingford poured and patted liquid paper on every rock, bone, pebble, and bit of detritus in the dry bed. Pat Switzer followed us with her camera. We were framed by tall red mesas and yellow poplar trees.
A Hopi filmmaker, Victor Masayesva, was to join us to capture the process. I had neglected to tell Victor exactly where to find us—only that we were in Castle Valley. But sure enough, he appeared one day. When I asked him how he found us, he cryptically replied, “Finding whites in the land is easy.” It seemed that despite our best efforts to not disturb the land, not move a rock, and to use only biodegradable materials, none of us knew how to tread lightly on the earth.
One day, after hours of crouching over the riverbed, I stood to stretch my back and looked up. The sky was turning deep indigo and the stars of the Milky Way were beginning to appear, forming a pattern that resembled the pattern of the stones in the riverbed below. I thought, “The whole world is patterned by water, yet I know nothing about water.” At this moment, I knew I had to continue along my path in learning more about water.
The next day, an elderly resident of the valley told me that the Indigenous people called the Milky Way “the river of stones.” That made perfect sense and prompted me to make many large drawings of stars and stones. I was surprised to discover that nearby camping sites had signs warning people not to drink the water. Earth First!, an organization active in the area, told us that the ground and surface water was highly contaminated from mining and agriculture. In response to this shocking information, I changed the name of the piece from A Tribute to Rivers to A Memory of Clean Water.
Working so intimately in that valley with the riverbed, the stones, and the air, the mesa awakened something in me, a longing so deep that when people assumed I would go on to cast more riverbeds or other natural environments, I thought, why would I do that? Would that teach me about water?
A Memory of Clean Water became a traveling installation. I would load the 250 feet of riverbed casting in a van and drive it around to show at museums. It sparked interest in water among viewers. It seemed that most people had not thought about where their water came from or went, and had never heard of aquifers or the relationships between mining and polluted waters. “Now what?” I asked myself when I returned home to New York. Although I was expected to continue casting rivers in paper, that would not have answered my questions: How does water create everything in my world? How important is water quality to life? Above all, what were the stars telling me?
The stars told me that the world is patterned by water.
Following through on my decision to know water led me to attend conferences on water. I was looking for any indication that water was more than the three stages in the hydrologic cycle, more than just wastewater to be treated, more than just a resource to be transported around and sold.
Quietly, my dad was following my work. He picked up Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air at a garage sale. This book contains the research work of Theodor Schwenk, anthroposophist, engineer, and pioneering water researcher. Schwenk founded the Institute of Flow Sciences at the Max Planck Institute in Herrischried, Germany. Once I discovered Schwenk’s work, I was on my way to discovering more and more about the real nature of water.
Excerpted with permission from Water Talks by Betsy Damon, published by Steiner Books (2022).
In this episode, we speak with Julian Brave NoiseCat, a proud member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen and a descendant of the Lil’Wat Nation of Mount Currie.
Julian Brave NoiseCat explores the importance of connection and relationship, to family, to history, to place and to culture, threading his own story throughout a larger narrative about the deep trauma Indigenous people have experienced through colonization and the resilience and power that is emerging as individuals, tribes and nations work to reclaim their own stories and landscapes.
Julian is a fellow of New America and the Type Media Center, Vice President of Policy & Strategy at Data for Progress as well as one of the first visiting fellows of the Center for Racial Justice at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy. In 2021, NoiseCat was named on the Time 100 list of emerging leaders.
We begin with Julian’s keynote address at the Bioneers 2020 conference and follow with a heartfelt conversation hosted by Cara Romero.
A prolific, widely published Indigenous journalist, writer, activist and policy analyst, Julian Brave NoiseCat has become a highly influential figure in the coverage and analysis of Environmental Justice and Indigenous issues as well as of national and global political and economic trends and policies.
You can follow Julian on Twitter @jnoisecat.
Photograph by Dante Garcia
Resources
Julian Brave NoiseCat – Apocalypse Then & Now – Julian Brave NoiseCat, an activist and one of this era’s most brilliant emerging progressive journalists and thinkers, lays out the case for the moral imperative to assure that Indigenous voices have a central role in humanity’s struggle to address the existential climate crisis.
Indigenous Activism NOW: Talking Story With Clayton Thomas-Muller and Julian NoiseCat – Clayton Thomas-Muller and Julian Brave NoiseCat are nationally and internationally acclaimed Indigenous leaders in the fights against climate change and the accelerating, human-induced destruction of our ecosystems. When they aren’t on the front lines organizing movements to protect the planet, Clayton and Julian work as accomplished writers penning penetrating analyses of the connections between settler colonial capitalism, broken social and political systems, trauma, and environmental disaster. They also happen to have a deep friendship. In this intimate conversation, these two exemplary leaders share the story behind the story about how their lives intersect with their activism and discuss their new projects and their hopes for the future. Moderated by Alexis Bunten (Unangan/Yup’ik), Co-Director of the Bioneers Indigeneity Program.
The Indigenous Renaissance | Julian Brave Noisecat – The brilliant young writer, journalist and activist Julian Noisecat offers his insights into how, around the world, Indigenous peoples are rising in a global renaissance that holds untapped promise for a world in peril.
This is an episode of Indigeneity Conversations, a podcast series that features deep and engaging conversations with Native culture bearers, scholars, movement leaders, and non-Native allies on the most important issues and solutions in Indian Country. Bringing Indigenous voices to global conversations. Visit the Indigeneity Conversations homepage to learn more.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Co-Hosts and Producers: Cara Romero and Alexis Bunten
Senior Producer: Stephanie Welch
Associate Producer and Program Engineer: Emily Harris
Consulting Producer: Teo Grossman
Studio Engineers: Brandon Pinard and Theo Badashi
Tech Support: Tyson Russell
This episode’s artwork features photography by Dauwila Harrison. Mer Young creates the series collage artwork.
Additional music provided by Nagamo.ca, connecting producers and content creators with Indigenous composers.
Transcript
ALEXIS BUNTEN: Hi, Everyone. Welcome to Indigeneity Conversations. I’m Alexis Bunten, co-host and also co-director of the Bioneers Indigeneity Program along with Cara Romero.
CARA ROMERO: Hi Everyone. Today we’re honored to be sharing an intimate conversation I had with Julian Brave NoiseCat, a member of the Canim Lake Band and descendant of the Lil’Wat Nation. Julian is a world renowned journalist who recently won the American Mosaic Journalism Prize for outstanding long form work that fosters greater understanding of underreported stories.
AB: Julian is a prolific, and widely published 28-year-old writer, activist and policy analyst. He’s become a highly influential figure in the coverage of Environmental Justice, Indigenous issues as well as broader political and economic trends and policies.
Julian is really a tour de force. He’s currently working on a book titled We Survived the Night. The book weaves together reportage on Indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada along with a personal narrative about his journey as a young man and writer. He’s also making a documentary that explores the links between colonization, genocide and ecocide. It follows Julian as he searches for unmarked graves at the Canadian residential school that his relatives were sent to.
CR: Our conversation offers insight into Julian’s personal stories that have brought him to where he is today, his philosophies behind the work, and our shared experiences.
First you’ll hear Julian’s keynote address at the 2021 Bioneers Virtual Conference, and then we move right into our conversation.
Here’s Julian…
Julian Brave NoiseCat: Weyt-kp xwexwéytep.
Julian Brave NoiseCat ren skwekwst. Ren kiké7ce te skwest re Alexandra Roddy ell ren Qeqe7tsé te skwest re Ed Archie NoiseCat. Secwecwepmc-ken ell St’itlimx-ken. Te Tsq’escen re tst7ekwen. Te Oakland re tst7ekwen.
Le7 ren pupsmen ne7elye tek tmícw w7ec re Piscataway-ulucw. Qweqwlut-ken te Bioneers. Te Coast Miwok ell Ohlone-ulucw re qw7éles.
Me7 peqíqlc-ken te Secwepemc-ulucw.
Pyin te sitq’t lexexyem-ken te necwepepl’qs re qelmucwúy ell re tmícw.
Good afternoon. I thought it would be most appropriate to start my keynote in my language, Secwepemctsin, which I was lucky enough to learn from my Kyé7e, that’s my grandmother. She’s the oldest person on the Canim Lake Indian Reserve, and one of our last remaining fluent speakers. When she was a little girl, a government official called an Indian agent took her and a bunch of other kids from Canim Lake away from their families on the back of a cattle truck to an Indian residential school called St. Joseph’s Mission. There, they were brutalized for speaking their language and taught to hate themselves for being Indian.
Earlier this year, 215 unmarked graves of Native children, some as young as 3, were discovered at the site of the Kamloops Indian residential school. My Kyé7e earned her nursing degree there. Not long after, 182 hidden burials were identified at a residential school in Cranbrook, British Columbia, then 751 in Maryville, Saskatchewan, 160 in Penelakut, British Columbia.
Across the continent, First Peoples are now searching for the bones of our young ones at the schools that were supposed to civilize us. Over the last four years, I’ve been journeying back to St. Joseph’s—excuse me, over the last four months, I’ve been journeying back to St. Joseph’s Mission in my people’s homelands where they’re using ground penetrating radar to find my Kyé7e friends, cousins and classmates who never came home.
When I was there in August, I interviewed a former Kukpí7 or Chief. He had never publicly spoken about the residential school and his origins, but on camera he told me he was the illegitimate child of the priest, the product of kidnap and rape. Even though he was the child of a white father, he was taken to a residential school with all the other Native kids, and like all the other Native kids, he was abused. When I was there, he told me, “We all were.”
After he shared his story, which ran more than three hours, I stepped out of his front door on the Sugar Cane Indian Reserve, ash was falling from the sky. Western Canada, the western United States, and really the whole world seemed ablaze. This summer, the Northwestern part of North America was gripped by a heat dome that set all time temperature records from Portland, Oregon to Port Smith in the Northwest Territories. As of mid-August, heat, wind, lightning, and humans sparked over 1500 wildfires in British Columbia. One small town, Lytton, where I have friends and relations, burned complete to the ground. It’s now little more than a grid of concrete foundations and scorched chimneys. The province of British Columbia, like many other jurisdictions, declared a state of emergency.
Now I’m currently working on my first book and a documentary, and in both of those projects, I’m thinking through the convergence of these apocalypses – the genocide of colonization and the ecocide of climate change. I’m trying to understand how Indigenous Peoples have persisted in the face of existential threats, because I believe that our survival ought to matter to more people than just ourselves, that it ought to matter to you.
I chose to begin my keynote in my language tonight because I wanted to show you that in our words, and in our very being, Indigenous Peoples are refusing to be annihilated.
In Secwepemctsin, I said who I am in relation to my kin, to my community, and to the places I come from because those things matter, not just to Indians, but to all people. At this dire juncture, with a pandemic engulfing humanity, and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere climbing to levels not seen in 3.6 million years, we all need to remember who we are, how we are related, where we come from, and how the other-than-human world, to which we are also related, gives us life.
Allow me to demonstrate. When I introduced myself, I said, “My name is Julian Brave Noisecat.” And that meant something, because NoiseCat or Newísket as the name was originally pronounced before the missionaries messed it up, it nearly died out. You see, at St. Joseph’s, the missionaries baptized us with Christian names. Before then, our people carried ancestral names and earned names, what you might know as Indian names, and we could take on many in a lifetime.
But as they were taking control of our lands, the government of Canada and the Church said that that would not do. Us Indians could not be plural, we could only be individuals. They said you Indians need one name so we can keep track of you, so we can confine you on reservations, count your dwindling numbers, and mark our control of your lives. They gave us names in their faith so they could save us from our supposed savagery. When stealing and destroying are called civilizing and enlightening, they can be justified.
In fact, they were so good at taking away names, that when she died, my great grandmother, Alice NoiseCat, was the last person to carry her name. Alice raised my father when her own parents were all messed up from the residential school could not. She was a hard worker. He remembers her towing him out on the family trapline in a sled made from an old car hood. They’d check all the traps, pulling frozen beaver and muskrats out of the water so they could sell their fur and feed their family. They didn’t have much, and hunger was common. But Alice, Alice was generous.
One time, she found a fresh apple, a hard thing to come by on the rez, even today, and she saved it for my dad because she knew he loved them. And then one night, in 1966, he remembers when she went out looking for her husband, Jacob, who was out drinking in a blizzard, and she froze to death.
After Alice was gone, there were no NoiseCats in the whole world until my father married, reclaimed her name, and passed it onto me.
Remember who you are. Be true to who you are. There’s power in that. But also remember that the power of identity is not individual, it’s plural, it’s collective.
The next thing I did when I introduced myself in my language was I put myself in relation to my family and my people. And here, I should acknowledge that praising boomers probably isn’t the wisest decision given the general state of things. As young people, we have certainly inherited far too many problems from our elders, climate change included.
But that said, I think it’s important to remember that we are not alone, that we have relatives, that we are, in fact, all related, and not just us humans. The other-than-human world shares some of our DNA too. If we remember that, maybe we will recognize that our fates are also interrelated.
Over the last five years, my father and I have participated in the tribal canoe journey. It’s an annual indigenous gathering on the West Coast, where tribal people organized into what are called canoe families, get into their ocean-going vessels, and paddle for days and even weeks across the seas. At the end of those voyages, we converge on a single community for a week-long celebration of food, gifts, speeches, dances, and songs.
My father wasn’t around for most of my childhood. He was struggling with alcoholism and the demons inherited from St. Joseph’s and the cycles of poverty, dysfunction and abuse it unleashed on Canim Lake. But the canoe journeys have brought us back together, and they helped us recognize the importance of family. You see, the beautiful thing about the canoe is that it quickly teaches you that if you want to go anywhere, you need other people, you need a family, you need to go together.
The K’omoks First Nation received over 50 canoes en route to Campbell River in British Columbia on the annual Tribal Canoe Journey. Photo by Julian Brave NoiseCat
Pulling alongside dozens of members of canoe families that welcomed us into their vessels with open arms, my father and I have traveled across international borders and hundreds of miles of ocean. We’ve made countless friends, learned dozens of new songs, and visited many magical places. We’ve been inspired. And in 2019, we were inspired to bring the canoe journey to Alcatraz Island. That year marked the 50th anniversary of the Alcatraz occupation, a 19-month protest for indigenous self-determination, sovereignty, and treaty rights.
I need you to understand how important the Alcatraz occupation was to Indigenous Peoples. It’s like our version of the Montgomery bus boycott. It launched a social movement that changed the hearts and minds of Native and non-Native people across the country and around the world. Alcatraz made Indians proud to be Indian again, and it transformed federal policy.
During the occupation, President Nixon, the frickin’ Watergate guy, shifted the federal government’s policy from an officially stated goal of termination to one of self-determination.
Working with our own canoe family, which we called the Occupied Canoe Family, my mother, father, and group of friends that included a youth worker and an Alcatraz occupation veteran, organized a paddle around Alcatraz Island on Indigenous Peoples Day in 2019. Eighteen canoes, including some from as far north as Canada, participated. Dozens of media outlets covered the story. A local TV station broadcast the canoes, circumnavigating the island from its traffic helicopter. Our little all-volunteer effort even made it into The New York Times. And for a day, Alcatraz was not seen as the former federal prison, but instead as a symbol of indigenous freedom, the way Native Peoples see it.
We can do a lot together when we recognize the fact that we need relatives, that we need family. Every time my father and I got out into the water, we rekindled and deepened our connection to the seas and places that gave us our Salish culture.
And in my introduction, I also told you where I come from. Canim Lake, called Tsq’escen in our language, and Oakland, the town by the Bay that raised me. I also acknowledged that today I’m speaking to you from Washington, DC, the homeland of the Piscataway people, and that you all in Marin are on the territory of the Coast Miwok and Ohlone. It was a very cosmopolitan land acknowledgement, one that in its head-splitting multiplicity demonstrated how our synthetic, Zoom-connected internet reality can dislocate us from a meaningful relationship to the places where we are.
I think that’s dangerous. Because if we don’t stop to remember and honor the places we come from and rely upon, how can we possibly defend them?
Earlier this year, I was asked to write an essay for the Paris Review celebrating the Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday, who was the First Native American to win the Pulitzer prize for fiction. While reporting that piece, I discovered that Momaday actually taught one of the original student leaders of the Alcatraz occupation. Her name was LaNada War Jack, and in 1968, she became the first Native American student at UC Berkeley.
Now, although Momaday never got involved with the Alcatraz occupation or the Native Rights movement, War Jack told me that his lectures influenced her profoundly. So in my reading, reporting and writing, I set out to understand the ethic at the core of his work, the worldview it grew out of, and the movements it continues to influence. Rereading his books, I noted a brief postscript in my 2010 edition of the Pulitzer prize-winning House Made of Dawn. It read: Both consciously and subconsciously, my writing has been deeply informed by the land with a sense of place. In some important way, place determines who and what we are.
I am Tsq’escenemc, a person from Canim Lake, a place we call “Broken Rock” in our language, but I am also a son of Oakland, a visitor in Washington, DC, and now a virtual guest at Bioneers. My connection to those places and others is also an imperative. It demands that I remember, honor, and protect those patches of Earth.
Now that we are in dialogue and relation, I believe that you are asked to do the same. You might be thinking that I sound exceptionally proud of being Indian, and I’m certainly guilty of that. But this, this is not mere identity politics. What I’m saying, what I’m thinking through in the book I’m writing and the film I’m making is that a broader humanity facing the apocalypse of climate change might have a thing or two to learn from a people who’ve lived the near total loss of our own worlds, that Indigenous Peoples have something important to say if you’re willing to give us an audience like you have given me today; that there might be even ways that our humanity and our collective future can be brightened if you have it in your heart to believe that the civilizing mission was wrong, that the St. Joseph’s missions of the worlds had it all backwards, that in fact, in the long run, it’s all of you that have something to learn from all of us; that maybe America, Canada and the so-called civilized world should become just a little bit more indigenous rather than the other way around.
The United Nations says that climate change is nothing less than code red for humanity. It is already brutalizing many of the places we come from and rely upon. It is driving us apart, making us forget that we are not just interconnected but interrelated. We are all kin. And if we’re not careful, climate change is going to make us forget who we are – animals of remarkable intellect, capable of immense care and compassion, even when grave injustice has laid us low.
So my message for you today is simple: Remember who you are. Remember that you have many relatives, human and non-human. And remember that we all come from somewhere, and that those places, and the place called Earth, need us to fight for them.
CR: Julian, thank you so much. Your keynote delivery was stunning and heartbreaking, and I listened to every single word that fell from your mouth. So I just wanted to start our Q&A by saying thank you for your generosity and your many gifts that you share in this world.
I am interviewing you today from Oga Po’geh, from Santa Fe, the land of the Keres, Tewa, Tiwa, and Towa speaking peoples, also known as the Northern Pueblos. And in honor of your keynote, my bones are from the Mojave Desert. From the heart of the Mojave Desert along the California side of the Colorado River is where I’m from, and married into Cochiti Pueblo here, and like you, am a fierce defender of our cultural landscapes, and believe in the re-indigenization of people and the power of place.
I feel so grounded after your keynote, and loved the flow and the circular thinking. It really provided this comfortable feeling for me in the way that we speak of things and have an understanding of interconnectedness, an interconnectedness of kinship and of place and of where we come from.
I wanted to start out by asking you a little bit more, Julian, about where you’re from, about who your mom is. I have this deep sense that she must have been a very amazing person or that she is a very amazing person. Can you tell me a little bit about your mom?
JBNC: Yeah. Well, firstly, thank you for that really generous response to what I had to say and it’s very difficult for me to talk about my mom in part because I feel like I’m so close to her and have just been so lucky to be surrounded by her love my whole life, that it’s hard for me to have the kind of distanced lens, a certain kind of perspective. I find, as a writer, you can’t be so far away from something that you can’t see it, but when you’re so close to something in the way that I feel so close to my mom, I actually have a really hard time writing about and talking about her because like it’s—she’s just kind of everything to me.
Julian Brave NoiseCat with his mother Alexandra Roddy. Photo courtesy of Julian Brave NoiseCat
And I guess I should say that my father is Secwepemc and St’at’imc, like I said, from British Columbia, Canada. My mom is actually an Irish-Jewish New Yorker. They met in a bar called the Shadow Brook just outside of New York City. It’s like I’ve kind of dreamt this scene up as a—maybe a scene from a film or a novel before. Apparently my dad gave her the earrings out of his ears. It’s like, kind of how they got acquainted, and she was the bartender at the bar. So she gave him free drinks for the whole night.
And I guess what I would say is that my mother, even though she’s non-Native, made a lot of very instinctual and purposeful decisions to make sure that as a kid who looks the way I look and is connected to the community that I’m connected from, that I maintained that relationship. So she, from a very young age, before my parents actually split up, she would take me down to the Intertribal Friendship House, which is the third oldest urban Indian community center in the country. It’s on International Boulevard in Oakland, California. I’d go there for drum and dance practice every Thursday night.
And then very bravely, actually, she started taking me home to my family’s rez to visit my relatives, to visit my grandparents, my cousins, my aunts, my uncles which back in the day before Google maps and everything, like, it’s a really remote part of the world to get to from California, and she made that effort, despite the fact that she was not blood-related to them. But now she is sort of considered an auntie and a sister and a relative to my family, which reflects on the really loving decisions she made for me as a mom, but also I think on the ways that Native people can be very open and loving in the ways that we make and support relatives. She’s fully part of that family and community now, and I think that that’s a really incredible and beautiful thing, and has made it a lot easier for me coming from the kind of childhood situation and home where my dad was not in the picture for a lot of my upbringing to maintain something that at the end of the day has become incredibly important to me and sustaining to me in a way that sometimes it’s hard to find the words to capture.
CR: Well, thank you for your vulnerability. And I often find as I share and the more vulnerable we are with our upbringings, that you make me feel less alone and hopefully you connect with other young Native people. I hail from a very similar background with a single mom and absent Native father going through all of the things that you described. And I do know your father, and love him, and love the genius of his artwork. And in getting to know you, love to see the genius inherited and your art form being writing. And I have such a deep respect, as do so many of us, for your giftedness in writing, and was hoping that you would talk a little bit about learning that that was your gift and that that was your art growing up. Can you talk a little bit about your journey to becoming a writer, and maybe when you knew?
JBNC: I’m still not sure if I’m a writer. [LAUGHTER] Like I think I need to write at least one book before they let me call myself that.
So you brought up my dad, and I’ve had a complicated relationship with my father, but we’re good now, in part because of the canoe journeys, and I just think time can really heal some wounds. And I guess what I would say is that some of my earliest memories growing up were hanging out in his studio watching him carve, sitting in the back of his purple powwow van going to all sorts of Indian art shows, Indian Art Northwest in Portland and all sorts of different shows in random places across North America.
And I think my dad had designs on making me into like his apprentice. There’s a thing in the Native art world, especially with families that make art, and dads whose sons also go on to become artists, particularly among carvers. There’s carving families in the Northwest. And I think that that’s kind of maybe originally what he thought I was going to become, and then we obviously didn’t end up spending that much time together after I was a certain age.
Julian with his father, Ed Archie NoiseCat; Alder and abalone Bear Mother Moon Mask by Ed Archie NoiseCat. Photos courtesy of NoiseCat.
And then the way that I guess I started to fill that void was by trying to read and learn and understand, through other people’s stories, through novels, through history, who my dad was; who this absence in my life was, and who our people were. I obviously knew that through him and through my relationship to my family, but there was a whole world of literature and artistic interpretation of what it means to be indigenous out there that opened up to me when I started reading people like Leslie Marmon Silko and Sherman Alexie, despite how complicated it is for me to say that now, Louise Erdrich, etc. I started sort of emulating the way that they wrote short stories.
And then I just kind of kept at it. The reality of the media industry did not seem to make writing and journalism to be a sensible economic decision for me, but I just kept doing it, and eventually I stumbled into an idea for a book, and I kept getting published, and eventually I was very fortunate to get a book contract.
And in the process of doing all that, I guess this is sort of a long story, but I started to think about my craft as a writer, my art as a writer, in relation to my father’s craft as a carver and as a sculptor. And I do non-fiction. And what’s interesting about non-fiction in relation to carving and sculpting is that essentially in both art forms, you go out into the world and you gather material. My dad carves wood. So he goes and gets his logs and things to carve into various pieces. And to a large extent you’re limited in both carving and non-fiction writing by the material that you go out and gather in the world.
As a non-fiction writer, I’m not at liberty to make things up as they come to me in my mind, I have to go out and report them and gather them up, and then I can shape them down into the art form of the piece that I want to make. And so what I’ve kind of found is that even though I never conceptualized myself as sort of following in my father’s footsteps to become the sculptor that he wanted me to become, in a certain way I actually did end up following him down that road, at least conceptually and in the form of art and writing that I produce, and that that actually has now started to bring us together.
So we are now, over 25 years later, in the situation where we hang out. I interview him quite a bit for the book I’m working on, and talk about our art. He talks about the things that he’s writing on and we sort of bat ideas back and forth about things that we could make together, and at the same time I get his input on the pieces that I’m writing. So in a way, writing and art has always been and is now becoming very clear to me sort of a way of reconnecting to and processing my relationship to my father, and ultimately has actually kind of made me an artist in a way that’s not that different from his life as an artist.
CR: Well, you are telling such a powerful story with your art. As a Native person to another Native person, the complexity and the difficulty with the things that we have and need to communicate, it’s just a joy to read your writing and to listen to you speak. So I can’t wait to read your book and know more about your movie that you’re making. Can you share a little bit more about both of those things?
JBNC: Yeah. For sure. So my book is called We Survived the Night. The title is derived from the traditional word for good morning in my people’s language. It’s Tsecwínucw-k and it doesn’t actually translate to good morning. If you literally translate what it means, it means you made it through the night, or you survived the night. So the book sort of is going to begin with a little bit of reflection on what it must have meant for my people, my ancestors to say that to each other in the mornings after the children were taken to the residential schools, and the mornings after.
We learned that our land had been settled and taken from us without any sort of treaty or recompense by colonists. The mornings after, people died in our pithouses by the dozens, which is something that happened in 1862 and 1863. And then it sort of—The way that I think about it is that it’s a – in our language we call it lexey’em, which is like a kind of story that is not about the spiritual beings in the spiritual world, which is to say that it’s an account of both my sort of family and personal history as well as of the things that I’ve gotten to go out and report on in Indian Country in the United States and Canada and a few other places, and essentially what the story of Indigenous Peoples in North America is today.
So it’s divided into three thematic parts. The first is called Apocalypse. It’s about Indigenous Peoples as post-apocalyptic peoples, as people who survived the loss and destruction of our worlds. The second section is called Odyssey, and it’s about Indigenous Peoples journeying to, return to, and reclaim and remake our home and homelands. And then the third section is called Trickster, and it’s about Indigenous Peoples navigating the seams and contradictions between indigenous worlds and communities and forms of governance, and colonial worlds and institutions and politics.
The film—it’s a documentary, and it’s following the search for unmarked graves at the residential school, St. Joseph’s Mission, that my family was sent to, which is an ongoing search. So I’m working on that at the same time as I’m writing the book.
Photo by Emily Kassie
CR: It’s such a powerful development, this uncovering of what we’ve known for so long that has happened at the residential boarding schools. And I really look forward to the telling from indigenous perspective in both the book and the film.
Just an aside, it was about 15 years ago, our tribe is known for our funeral rites, that they bring in the Chemehuevis and the Southern Paiutes to help the spirit go to the other side, as well as to help the bereaved. And we had several singers go along the Salt Song Trail and go and conduct ceremony at Carlisle and at Sherman, and at several of the schools here in the United States where we hold those stories, where we know that the children never came home, and the stories of desperation of parents looking for their children.
And so the Salt Singers gave the children ceremony so that their spirits could be released, and that we could have some sort of closure. You know, it’s going to be a very heartbreaking path as we learn and share these stories, and hopefully find closure and some sort of ceremony, and bring children home. So self-care is very important. And so I wish you and everyone that is part of this movement blessings and self-care along your journey. And what you’re doing is really important.
I wanted to talk a little bit about your work as the vice president of policy and strategy at Data for Progress. And can you talk a little bit about transitioning into this work and the importance of data? And a little bit more about your behind-the-scenes work in Washington, and being a citizen activist.
JBNC: Yeah. Well, first I just want to say thank you for sharing the story of the Salt Song Trail, and the bringing home of the—of your people’s children. I think that so many different nations and communities are doing that work right now, and it’s incredibly heavy, heavy work. Every time I come back from Williams Lake, I have trouble getting out of bed for like two or three days.
And yeah, so I just think that it’s important to acknowledge and think about, take care of ourselves and each other, and support all the people who are going through the process of telling the truth to a broader public who seems to be listening, maybe for the first time, to a lot of these stories, and seeking justice and accountability to the people who did this, and trying to restore a sense of dignity and wholeness and healing to so many families and people who were so deeply harmed and I mean, it’s just—it makes me sick and angry whenever I think about it.
So I never really worked full time as a writer until now, my primary career was in the sort of nonprofit, activist think tank kind of space. So a few years ago, a friend of mine named Sean McElwee invited me to become the first employee at a think tank he was creating called Data for Progress. And at that think tank I focused on and still am quite focused on climate change policy and public opinion research, as well as advocacy for more progressive climate solutions and legislative interventions and regulations and those sorts of things.
And essentially it was a start-up, and while I was there we grew from the two of us to now Data for Progress employs over 20 people, which was a really cool thing to be a part of. I also got to get pretty involved behind the scenes in a number of campaigns that actually did see, it seems, to have some real world policy impact. I think I was the first, for example, to put out the idea that Deb Haaland should be the Secretary of Interior, and through a sort of a public relations insider/outsider, online and sort of advocacy campaign, we ended up actually winning that push to make her the first ever Native American cabinet secretary. She’s obviously now the Secretary of the Interior. And the ability to do that was in large part because of my role and my freedom at the think tank Data for Progress. So I’m really, really grateful for that, and really grateful for everyone who I worked with who also played really important roles in helping make that happen.
You know, I think essentially data is both a way to understand what’s really going on out in the world. Right, like, there’s a lot of bad data, but if you have data that’s collected in ways that are sound social science, sound data science, you can get a more accurate representation of, for example, what people actually think about issues like climate change, and then you can use that to inform realistic and pragmatic strategies to actually act on and transform the world that exists, which is, I think, sort of the role of activism and advocacy.
But also I think it’s important to understand that data can be—itself can be used as a tool. Right? So if you have information about the views of voters of the public on a particular issue, that can then persuade an elected official, a politician, a political party to behave in different ways. That is one way in which you can make democracy actually more responsive and more progressive and active on issues related to climate change.
And so working in DC and working in this sort of think tank, activist/advocacy space the last four years, I’ve learned how all of that actually happens and works, and sometimes doesn’t work, and in a way I think it’s actually made me better at writing and understanding things like politics and policy and understanding the ways that political actors actually make decisions, and the ways that they might be persuaded to make different and better political decisions, which I think at the end of the day, if you care about a lot of these things, that is pretty important knowledge and information.
CR: I think, definitely, understanding as much as you can about how to affect change politically, and then you have that other really sound piece of being able to influence public opinion. And I think that that is a combination of what you’re talking about, that solid data.
And then art, you know. I mean, I’m just such a believer in the power of art. So to be able to combine your art form to influence people and public opinion is really important. And I think I’m saying that for the young Native people out there that are listening; that, I know I come from a platform of encouraging citizen activism, that no person is without power to affect change.
Do you want to speak to that a little bit, as well? Because I just think that you’re such a wonderful example of making big change as one person.
JBNC: I got the opportunity to learn from and work with lots of other people who understood and knew about things in ways that I did not yet, especially when I was younger, and earlier on in my career, and that, at the most basic level, working together collectively and collaboratively, that’s what politics and democracy are. It’s about groups of people with ideas and values, about how we should govern ourselves, trying to convince as many people in society that that’s actually the best, most just, most equitable, most prosperous way to arrange things for the greatest number of people.
That world, the political world, can be a very brutal one. It’s one where lots of hopes and dreams die in the sort of a meat grinder of Congress and electoral politics and those sorts of things. But that once in a while, the right people, the right ideas, and the right sort of, I don’t know, I think moral relationship to how we should be relating to each other as humans can come around and the right things can happen, and especially can happen when we find common ground and figure out ways to work together, and figure out ways to convince other people that we’ve got some good ideas and they ought to throw their lot in with us rather than the cynics and the bigots and the people who would rather see the world burn.
And in the context of climate change, which is essentially the largest collective action problem of them all, right, it implicates not just every American but every single person in the world, and every society in the world in the epic task of reducing emissions and adapting to a warmer planet. I think that that’s kind of our only option, is to figure out how to make these systems, these democratic systems – as long as they’re democratic, by the way, because they might not always be democratic, you know, work in our favor. And so I would encourage any young person who is interested in that part of how society works to just go for it and be willing to learn and to collaborate and work with other people, because we need as many people in this fight as we can get.
Photos by Emily Kassie.
CR: And I would add to that that as we foster young leaders to listen to your keynote and listen to the messaging of understanding indigenous issues and the way that you beautifully illustrate the connection between the genocide of Indigenous Peoples, the First Peoples of place, and as that relates and correlates with ecocide. You have to look at that connection. We have to scream it from the hilltops so that people understand that in order to rebuild and find solutions, you’re not going to be able to do that without that spiritual interdependence that Native Peoples have with each other and with their landscapes, and with their bioregions.
Thank you, Julian, for sharing with us and for being so generous with me today during this Q&A.
JBNC: Well, I just want to say a big Kukwstsemc. Thank you very, very much.
It’s hard to grow up inheriting all the things that we inherit intergenerationally as Native Peoples, but I also think it’s really important to remember that there are incredibly powerful, beautiful and important things that we also inherit. It’s not just the shit that they did to us at the residential schools. There’s a lot more there that is worth learning and fighting for, and taking up.
I would especially encourage the young Native People who see this to be part of that long line of fighters and ancestors who are going to try to bring us back to who we were, because it was a beautiful way, I think.
CR: [words in her language], Julian. Thank you so much.
AB: That was a great conversation with Julian, Cara. Keep an eye out for the book and documentary coming out in the next year or so. Again, the book is titled, We Survived the Night. And you can follow Julian on Twitter for more details about the book and documentary, as well as his regular political analysis.
And to hear other episodes of Indigeneity Conversations, and hear and see more from Julian Brave NoiseCat, visit our podcast page at Bioneers.org.
CR: You can find other original Indigenous media content there, and learn about the Indigeneity program and our initiatives, including curricula and materials for students and life-long learners. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Indigeneity Conversations. It’s been a pleasure to share with you today. Many thanks and take care!
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