Indigenous Land Acknowledgment + This Week's Questions
Dear community,
Thank you all so much for your understanding, support, and patience as we make some necessary changes around here. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out our last email here). We are also truly grateful for folks who have offered to help write/edit the newsletter, host sessions, and/or create questions for discussion. If any of those things interest you, please let us know how you’d like to get involved.
We had a wonderful meeting last night discussing the second half of How to Be an Anti-Racist, and we hope you can join us on Sunday, September 13 at 10am PT (11am MT, 12pm CT, 1pm ET) if you weren’t able to attend yesterday.
You can also already sign up for a meeting time for our September book, Women, Race & Class, which will be offered on Sunday, October 4 at 10am PT (11am MT, 12pm CT, 1pm ET), and on Wednesday, October 7th at 7pm ET (6pm CT, 5pm MY, 4pm MT). Plus! You can pick up our October book, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi from your favorite Black-owned bookstore. We are so excited to get into some fiction with y’all.
Before I get into the amazing questions Jess wrote for this week’s meeting, we’d like to thank our amazing community member Sierra for calling us into the practice of Indigenous land acknowledgment. As we discuss anti-racism, we have to acknowledge the role settler colonialism has played in the countries most of us reside in and/or by our governments, and how that is deeply linked to global racism and anti-Indigenous sentiment/violence.
At our meetings this week, our opening prompt is having everyone acknowledge the indigenous land they are on. We encourage each and every one of you to find out who are the original peoples of the land you occupy, learn about them, and support their fights for things such as land reclamation.
This site will help you learn whose land you are on. This one frames the importance of Indigenous land acknowledgment and gives some pointers on how to make this a meaningful, rather than performative, practice. And finally, this map of North America according to the tribal nations is a vital resource in decolonizing our notion of place. Once again, thank you Sierra!
Whether you’re joining our meeting or reading along on your own timeline, we hope this week’s questions will help you reflect on what we’ve been reading. This week’s questions are explicitly focused on How to Be an Anti-Racist, as we’ve gone though a lot of content from Kendi these past couple of weeks, and there’s a lot to process!
In the Chapters White and Black, Kendi explores a complex topic. He expresses the ideas that hatred of white people and classification of all white people as racist is racism, or at least a racist idea, and that Black people can be racist. The idea that Black people can be racist primarily focused on anti-Blackness among Black individuals, and said that the idea that Black people cannot be racist because they do not have power then undermines the ability of Black people with power to undo racist policies. These chapters are in contrast to what many of us have been taught about racism, and our roles as white people in the fight for racial justice. What did you make of these chapters? What did you agree with, and what did you disagree with?
In the chapter on Class, Kendi discusses racial capitalism. As America faces an economic crisis from the pandemic, including a national eviction crisis, this chapter feels especially pertinent. What resonated with you most from this chapter? What role does your relationship to (and understanding of) capitalism play in your exploration of how to be a better antiracist?
In the chapters on Gender and Sexuality, Kendi expands on the notion of Intersectionality, and teaches us about the Combahee River Collective and other radical Black feminists and womanists who shaped the feminist movement and racial justice movement as we know it today. How did these chapters change or deepen your understanding of intersectionality as we build off the intersectionality readings in So you want to talk about race?
On activism, Kendi says on page 209, “The original problem of racism has not been solved by suasion. Knowledge is only power if knowledge is put to the struggle for power. Changing minds is not a movement. Critiquing racism is not activism. Changing minds is not activism. An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change. If a person has no record of power or policy change, then that person is not an activist.”
What did you make of this quote? How does this idea instruct your next steps in the fight for racial justice? How does this support or contradict the calls to action we have seen since the murder of George Floyd?
In solidarity,
Lori
This week we are…
Taking action by…
Finding an Indigenous organization in our area and following, donating, supporting how they see fit!
Jess picked: Native American Rights Fund (A national legal aid and protection organization for indigenous rights, headquartered on Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute land in what is now known as Boulder, Colorado).
And I picked: Red Mujeres Mapuche (The Mapuche Women’s Network) based here in Wallmapu or what is known as Chile.
Also, did you know that Indian Country was largely left out of the federal response and stimulus package for COVID-19?? Learn more from the Center for American Progress here, and donate to the Native COVID-19 Action Fund, led and funded by Return to The Heart Foundation. While you’re at it, follow the visionary leader of Return to The Heart Foundation, Sarah Eagle Heart on Twitter at @Ms_EagleHeart.
Reading…
Book Club reading:
As our last letter stated, this week’s reading is Women, Race, & Class Ch. 1-4, but by September 20th we recommend you read through Ch. 7.
Me and White Supremacy reading and journaling prompts days 22-25.
Alright, so I’ve mentioned this interview before (and technically you can read or watch it) but I think it locates the arguments and frameworks in Women, Race, & Class in 2020 remarkably. Angela Davis on Democracy Now.
And this one’s in Spanish, but you can run it through Google Translate. The original people of the part of Chile I live in are the Mapuche, so I read this article about Mapuche Women and Feminism.
Listening to…
Sierra also recommended this podcast, All My Relations, hosted by two Indigenous women, and we can’t wait to get into it. I’m particularly excited to check out this episode on Decolonizing Sex and this one on Food Soverignty.
Those of you who have attended Sunday meetings know that my 19-year old brother is a part of the group, and a few weeks ago he mentioned how these discussions aren’t actually so new or difficult for people in Gen Z. Well, turns out it isn’t just him and his friends. The Kids Are All Right - Code Switch.
Watching…
I’m a huge fan of Haymarket Books in general, but have been really loving their Teach-Ins during lockdown.
Why Are So Many Native Americans Dying From Coronavirus - AJ+.