00:03:48.180Dr. TallBear, thank you so much for joining us on For the Wild. You've been somebody I've been
00:03:56.160anticipating to speak with and I feel so connected to the way you see the world and your connections
00:04:03.300with Donna Haraway. And so I think this is going to be a really expansive and grounding conversation
00:04:10.940to have with you. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me.
00:04:14.060So before we delve into your tremendous body of work on settler sexuality, creating kin, and the politics of genetic science, I'd like to begin with a bit of a primer on the history of monogamy.
00:04:28.680or at least if you could clarify for listeners how monogamous marriage really takes hold in this
00:04:36.160country in the 19th century and why we must understand the institution of marriage as a tool
00:04:42.260of settler colonial nation building so i work between the u.s and canada and i'm from the united
00:04:48.360states but i now live in canada i've been up here since 2015 and so i've had some opportunity to
00:04:53.700think a lot about the interconnections and the way that colonialism happens between the two nation
00:04:57.820States. And also historically, my people, Dakota people, were moving across landscapes that are
00:05:03.580now occupied by the U.S. and Canada when that border wasn't there, right? And even post-contact,
00:05:09.200Dakota people moved into Canada because they were fleeing the U.S. military in the 1860s when the
00:05:15.100reservation era was really kind of in full swing. So there is a lot of back and forth,
00:05:18.540both historically and today. And a lot of lessons learned between those two countries.
00:05:23.380So yeah, there's a lot of lessons of colonization, I think, taken between the two countries.
00:05:27.820And very similar kinds of processes happen.
00:05:29.940So in the 19th century, when you see the reservation era in the U.S. and the reserve era really heating up in both countries, there are a lot of governmental institutions and policies that are all working in concert with one another.0.62
00:05:46.140So colonization is a very elaborate project, right?
00:05:48.720And one really driven by the rise of the nation state in the 19th century in North America, the civilizational project.
00:05:56.940The project was to make good citizens. Indians, quote unquote, were standing in the way of that. So you had a real drive to break up the collective indigenous land base into private property and private allotments.0.81
00:06:10.940And so you have what's called the allotment era and allotment policy happening in both the US and Canada in the mid to late 19th century. And so what they want to do is find a way to attach individual parcels of land to individual names.
00:06:24.260And because there had been a great decimation of indigenous populations, you've got a real fall in population. So there's this idea that settlers have that there's all this excess land that's going to be left over. So what they have to do is turn the remaining Indians that haven't died or been massacred into these good private property owning citizens.
00:06:43.260And once they dissolve the collective land base into private parcels and give, you know, 160 acres to the men who become head of household, which is not how it was in many indigenous communities, another 80 acres for the wife, 40 acres for each child.0.63
00:06:57.120When all of that land has been assigned to the Indians, to the individual nuclear families that they're also making, they can then disperse the excess land to settlers that are flooding in from Europe with all of its problems that it's having, right, and sort of expelling its excess population because of the kinds of political economic problems that they're having.0.58
00:07:16.560So part of dissolving the collective land base is the constitution of the nuclear family.0.74
00:07:21.340So this is remaking and disrupting indigenous kinship relations, which do not occur in these
00:07:42.100Well, religion has always worked with the state.
00:07:44.060So the state was also dead set on imposing state sanctioned one-on-one heterosexual monogamous marriage because it helped its private property goals, right? And that helped make this notion of the good citizen. And so this is happening in the mid to late 19th century. And it's not only Native people, of course, who are being forced into these heteronormative monogamous nuclear families, it's immigrants coming from other cultures that have more extended and diffuse kinship relationships that are practicing non-monogamy.
00:08:09.780And so the Canadian historian Sarah Carter has a really interesting book on the imposition of monogamy onto Native people and other populations in Canada in the mid to late 19th century. There's another historian in the U.S., forgetting her name right now, but I'll come back to it, who also writes about a similar kind of project in the United States.
00:08:28.600So it does happen to be women, probably self-declared feminist historians who are writing about this project. So that's the kind of history that underlies largely what I'm talking about in my work. There's another also influential body of thinkers that Angie Willey talks about in her book, Undoing Monogamy, that came out a couple of years ago.
00:08:46.040When Angie Willey, who is at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, I believe, writes about the work of sexologists in Europe at the turn of the 20th century, there's also this kind of civilizational discourse going on, right, where the responsible Western enlightened civilized thinker is marrying for love.
00:09:04.240Arranged marriages are considered to be something from these less evolved cultures.
00:09:08.640And so you've got this real kind of ideology of individualism, right?
00:09:12.460An individual choice that's going along with the promotion of marriages for love and these
00:09:27.880So here you've got the church, you've got the state, and you've got science.
00:09:30.840And these are the three broad kinds of institutions that I talk about in my work, and they have always worked in concert in the colonial project.
00:09:40.400Well, to continue opening up this conversation, I'd love to share with listeners an excerpt from your blog, The Critical Polyamorist, wherein you write, quote,
00:09:50.680At a giveaway, we do them often at powwows. The family honors one of our own by thanking the
00:09:56.920people who jingle and shimmer in circle. They are with us. We give gifts in both generous show and
00:10:03.500as acts of faith in sufficiency. One does not future hoard. We may lament incomplete colonial
00:10:10.260conversions, our too little bank savings. The circle we hope will sustain. We sustain it.1.00
00:10:17.480Not so strange then that I declined to hoard love and another's body for myself. I cannot have faith in scarcity. I have tried. It cut me from the circle. End quote.
00:10:29.400wow so kim can you begin by sharing with us how the politics of marriage sex and family
00:10:38.700is deeply entwined to notions of scarcity and abundance and can you also speak to the
00:10:44.860sustainability that is inherently built into this sort of abundance yeah you know i think when i
00:10:51.040wrote that that's one of my hundreds i write these 100 word creative non-fiction vignettes that are
00:10:55.840another way for me to, it's maybe a kind of ethnographic writing, but it allows for further
00:11:00.800anonymization. And they're also just really generative for my thinking. I found that writing
00:11:05.380in a more poetic voice is similar to writing in a theoretical voice. It's the same kind of
00:11:10.220wordsmithing and conciseness that you're looking for in precision. So it's really a good format
00:11:15.200for writing. And I think when I wrote that one, I was thinking a lot about Thomas Princeton's book,
00:11:19.820The Logic of Sufficiency, that came out about 10 years ago, in which he argues that sufficiency
00:11:24.420should be enough that we need to get away from this notion of a constant economic growth. This
00:11:29.020is not sustainable for the world. And I was thinking a lot about how the culture that I
00:11:34.100come from, when you look at our oral histories and the ways that we understand our ancestors
00:11:39.180lived before private property, before the disruption of our collective land holdings,
00:11:43.880to have sufficiency was enough, right? And also the fact that we moved a bit, we moved around,
00:11:49.180we migrated kind of in a circular fashion through our homelands and territories, you know,
00:11:53.740depending on the season and which resources we needed at which time of year, right? So there's
00:11:58.720a sort of circle that's happening in these migratory routes. And of course, there's visiting
00:12:02.920people along the way, but you can't be a hoarder of a whole bunch of stuff when you're, you know,
00:12:07.400moving around like that. Not that we didn't have household goods and things like that. But so I was
00:12:11.940thinking a lot about that kind of history and thinking about how that might impact the way that
00:12:16.900we think about love and family. And we know that for Dakota people, we were a non-monogamous people.
00:12:23.580Now, the church and anthropologists are very complicit in disrupting our knowledge today
00:12:29.880that we might have of the way that our ancestors had romantic relations as we want to think
00:12:35.260about them now or how they had sex, the kind of family forms that they lived in, right?
00:12:38.980So it's a bit hard to know all of the details of how people actually practice their non-monogamy
00:12:44.800because this was a central target of the church and the state, right?
00:12:47.840This is a central way in which they portrayed our people as uncivilized, as savage, sexually0.84
00:13:12.780But we do know that it was possible for men to have multiple wives.
00:13:16.260We don't know to what degree those relationships were always sexual because there was a practice among Dakota people.
00:13:22.080Sometimes a man marrying his wife's sisters, say, if their husbands were killed or they needed taken care of.
00:13:29.960So you don't know to what degree a wife also was wed to this notion of sex, right?
00:13:34.280Like now we tend to think about marriage being the companionship, being the person you co-parent children with, being the person that you have a financial partnership and that person's also supposed to fulfill all of your sexual needs.
00:13:44.940So all of these diffuse sets of relations get objectified into this one role of wife
00:14:39.760We have a term in our culture called winkte, which is not directly mappable onto LGBTQ or queer, but it's somebody who could occupy it, maybe a different gender role than the sex that they were born into.
00:14:53.240And many Indigenous peoples across the Americas have these multiple gender roles, right, and also engaged in what we would today consider same-sex practices.
00:15:02.820So if you have these kinds of more diffuse relations and people being responsible for the caretaking of a wider variety of relatives and even maybe sometimes taking additional wives because of that caretaking imperative, you can begin to see where this is a much more caretaking and sustainable culture.
00:15:19.740you do not have this notion of the individual family that is headed by this heterosexual couple
00:15:25.680and the couple must be preserved at all costs. And so the couple in a sense becomes really
00:15:30.320fetishized. I find this really unsustainable. So couples have to stay together at all costs.
00:15:34.760We have this thing that we called a broken family or a failed family. There wasn't really that kind
00:15:40.140of concept in our culture because there were aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins,
00:15:44.440and there were always relatives around. And we had ways adopting relatives too. We still have
00:15:48.980adoption ceremonies to adopt non-biologically related kin. So there was always this imperative
00:15:53.740to make family and make kin. There are always people around that you needed to take care of,
00:15:57.700and that could potentially to help take care of you. So when you live in a world like that,
00:16:02.620the couple is just not that important. And I think that has been placed too much at the center of
00:16:07.460what we consider a good and workable family now. And I find that really unsustainable. Look at our
00:16:11.440divorce rates. Look at the unhappiness. I see this in polyamorous communities, people opening up
00:16:16.240their marriages in a desperate attempt to try and find a form of intimacy and love and connection
00:16:21.240again, and also often to save a marriage so they can keep their financial partnership and their
00:16:25.740parenting partnership intact, right? So I may have gotten away from your original question.
00:16:30.860No, I think it's all interconnected. And yeah, I mean, it's like ways of being in relationship
00:16:35.920that are not on the binary. And they're not also examples that many of us have been taught or even
00:16:43.280been aware that that could even be an option. I think that's something that this dominant culture
00:16:47.620does really well, is it gives us these containers. And if you don't fit into those containers,
00:16:53.620not only are you rejected in a way, but you're also not given the space to even imagine that
00:17:01.140there are ways to live outside of these very narrow ways of relating to one another. So it's
00:17:07.480just hearing you, I'm like, whoa, okay, what would it be like? How would that feel? What are other
00:17:12.660options to be in relationship with others that is healthy and regenerative. And I'm also really
00:17:18.120interested in delving deeper into our understanding of intimacy when it comes to decolonizing
00:17:23.500sexuality. Specifically, I'm thinking about what forms of intimacy and even intercourse do we shut
00:17:30.460ourselves off from when we abide by the objectification of sex or sexuality specifically?
00:17:36.820how is expanding our understanding of consensual intimacy with all forms of community a part of
00:17:44.400disrupting what you articulate as settler sex and the family structure part of what i want to do in
00:17:51.140my work and maybe this is getting at what you're saying i really want to focus on sex and sexuality
00:17:57.040because i want us to blow it apart and get beyond it stop fetishizing it stop objectifying it and
00:18:02.080stop putting it on a shelf. It's like some precious China that can only be touched under
00:18:06.560certain circumstances, right? Certain very rigid circumstances, or it must be hidden away and
00:18:12.180protected. Why is there even this concept of virginity? Give me a break. You know, like,
00:18:16.800how is that even a thing? I mean, fine, don't have sex, but why do we have to name it and call it a
00:18:21.660thing that has to be protected, right? It's really strange. I mean, I know why people do it, but
00:18:27.080this sort of misogyny that's behind that. So in thinking about blowing apart sex as a thing,
00:18:32.500I think what I want us to do is to realize that it's one way of relating. So one of the sets of
00:18:36.920people that I've been learning a lot from that have been making me think a lot in the last few
00:18:40.500years are asexual polyamorists or just asexual people in general. A lot of the asexual polyamorists
00:18:47.780I meet, obviously I meet them at conferences and things. They have multiple forms of intimacy and
00:18:53.900love like I have as somebody who's not asexual, but they don't necessarily have to have what we
00:18:58.920consider genital sex, right? Or the various forms of quote unquote sex. They don't have to have that0.81
00:19:04.380necessarily as part of their intimacy. It doesn't mean that they don't fall in love. It doesn't mean
00:19:08.800that they don't like cuddling or touch or need those kinds of relating. And sometimes they might
00:19:13.840even have sex, but it's not necessarily the same driver that it is for a lot of us. So they have
00:19:19.720actually just really taught me a lot about being in good relation and what that might look like.
00:19:23.760And, you know, sex can be one form of intimacy, but so is conversations. So is cuddling. So is
00:19:29.060looking into each other's eyes. So is sharing resources, you know, so is talking to one another,
00:19:34.020kindly listening to one another, reassuring one another. Sex can be one among many ways of
00:19:39.280relating. And I think if we come to look at it in that way, we can understand that we might want to
00:19:43.820be sharing it instead of hoarding it. And we can focus more on consent, right? Sex is something
00:19:48.880that I think we can have in abundance. What's really important is, is it possible to have it
00:19:54.760in this kind of consensual, mutually desired way? Yeah, I'm really interested learning more from you
00:20:03.000just now about the asexual polyamorous, because I think a lot about my personal relationships with
00:20:10.980people. And there's a lot of times where folks will feel more than maybe just a friend, but we're
00:20:17.560also not in a type of marriage relationship and we're also not having intercourse, but we do have
00:20:24.800romance and intimacy and so much love and so much sharing with one another. And there isn't
00:20:30.660a term in this culture, and maybe that's a good thing, that describes what we have. And it's kind
00:20:37.360of hard to explain to folks who aren't willing to shed those old identities when I try to explain
00:20:44.960how I relate to people in a way that isn't so rigid. And so yeah, I think you really spoke to
00:20:52.640all of those things. And it's interesting, specifically with polyamory, because it's
00:20:57.140inherently over sexualized in this dominant society where everything is turned into sex.
00:21:02.420So I'm also curious to hear how expanding our intimacy plays a role in combating this
00:21:07.920hyper sexualization of relationships beyond monogamy. You know, polyamorous, a lot of times
00:21:13.500are really trying to combat this idea that it's all about the sex, right? Because while many
00:21:17.640polyamorous love sex, including myself, you know, it is obviously not what it's all about, especially
00:21:22.100since we have asexual polyamorous, right? So again, I think if we can look at sex as just one more way0.51
00:21:28.360of relating, and it's appropriate with some people and not appropriate with others, but I think we
00:21:32.660could expand the categories of who it's appropriate with beyond what we have, right? And this is
00:21:38.860partly what polyamorous are trying to do with non-monogamy. So I think a lot about how making
00:21:43.980small practical changes can help us think in more generous and expansive ways about who
00:21:50.020we might relate to. So we talk a lot in polyamorous communities about the terms that we give our
00:21:55.880significant others, right? As we're trying to mess with categories and get away from rigid
00:22:00.400categorizations. And so I tend to settle on the terms, you know, sweetie, or I was thinking the
00:22:05.880other day about people that are lovely to me with the word love being part of that. So when I think
00:22:10.960about who my sweeties are, well, my number one sweetie is my daughter. I just love her so much.
00:22:15.320And she's so fun. And we have so much fun together. And we laugh so much together. But my other
00:22:20.040sweeties are the people that I have intimate sexual relationships with. And then I have very
00:22:25.040good friends. And you were getting at that a little bit ago, I have friends where, as I've
00:22:30.160expanded my notions of what counts as polyamory and multiple relating, I definitely have friends
00:22:35.440where it's always resting on what would previously have been a border between platonic and romantic.
00:22:40.580But if I do away with that border, again, these are people with whom it is appropriate to have
00:22:45.720consensual, perhaps sexual relations, right? I feel like having a more expansive category or
00:22:52.060name to call people is really helpful in not getting hung up on is this romantic or is this
00:22:57.380platonic, right? Again, I always come back to consent and who is it appropriate to relate with
00:23:02.400in which particular form. And if I'm focusing on that, I don't need to focus on, is this a real
00:23:07.620relationship? Is this romantic? Is this platonic? Are we quote unquote, just friends? I can't stand
00:23:12.640that term just friends, right? Friends are family friends are central. It is that's such an important
00:23:18.980sustaining relationship. Don't ever say just friends, unless you mean to denigrate that
00:23:23.940relationship, right? And that's, I think what a lot of us are trying to get away from who are
00:23:28.620practicing polyamory in a more critical way. And that would often also disproportionately
00:23:32.660includes queer people. I think there's a lot of straight people who are still
00:23:35.880doing polyamory in a way that Alexis Shotwell calls monogamy on steroids.
00:23:44.960Yeah, I really appreciate that what you're saying about just friends, and we make these
00:23:50.440relationships in a way less important by the language we use, because maybe we feel like
00:23:57.720we can't use different language because maybe that's not appropriate in the way that we've
00:24:01.820learned how we can quote appropriately relate to people. And, you know, just reading a lot of your
00:24:09.520work, I understand that we can't talk about intimacy without talking about relations. And
00:24:14.220for our listeners, I'd love to quote directly from your essay, making love and relations beyond
00:24:19.980settler sex and family from making kin not population, where you write quote, how does
00:24:26.640the different sustenance i gain from multiple lovers collectively fortify me and make me more
00:24:32.420available to contribute in the world if i am richly fed what and who am i able to feed what
00:24:40.420is possible with a model in which love and relations are not considered scarce objects
00:24:45.040to be hoarded and protected but which proliferate beyond the confines of the socially constituted
00:24:52.000couple and nuclear family, end quote. And to kind of move into another offshoot of this question,
00:25:00.080I'd love to talk about what we can learn from earthly relations in terms of non-monogamy,
00:25:06.260or perhaps more specifically delve into the topic of eco-sexuality. And so often it really
00:25:12.860feels like conversations on eco-sexuality are really stymied, in large part because I'm not
00:25:19.200even sure that the English language is equipped to discuss it in full fruition. So I'm wondering,
00:25:25.740does ecosexuality inform your work? And if so, what do you define as ecosexuality?
00:25:32.860Well, you know, I'm pretty close friends with Beth Stevens and Annie Sprinkle, who are some of
00:25:37.880the more well-known ecosexual performance artists out there. And I've been thinking with Beth and
00:25:43.340Annie since 2012, when I still lived in the Bay Area, and they invited me to the Dyke March one0.75
00:25:48.700day where they marched under the eco-sexual banner. It was really, it was so funny. There0.95
00:25:53.720were some of the young people at the Dyke March were just like, what? Who wants to do that?
00:25:59.980So, but it's been really generative for me. It's not my thing, but because I care about them as
00:26:05.860friends so much and because we're just in great conversation, right? And we have a lot of
00:26:09.560affection for one another. I've been thinking generatively with them since 2012 and thinking
00:26:35.780In fact, in Dakota language, it's built into the language to think about non-humans as
00:26:40.500your relatives and as your kin, as nations or persons, as peoples.
00:26:44.160You know, we don't have a human non-human divide built into the language and hierarchy in the same way that one has in English that one has to speak generally in Western thoughts. So I can see where people who are not coming out of an indigenous language and framework in history like me, need something like eco sexuality, some people might. So that's what was my initial thoughts.
00:27:03.620And then I also follow the work of somebody like Melissa Nelson, who's an Anishinaabe professor at San Francisco State. And Melissa's also in conversation with Beth and Annie in ecosexuality. And Melissa writes about indigenous ecoerotics. And so she's also working with the work of Audre Lorde. So there's a lot of thinkers out there that are giving us multiple kinds of languages that we might want to sit with and think with.
00:27:26.580So definitely I'm in conversation with ecosexuals, but because I'm so focused on pushing through sex to disaggregate it back into relations, I wouldn't necessarily use the terminology of ecosexuality in my own work.
00:27:40.460But I am comfortable having a conversation with ecosexuals and trying to find, I don't know, common ground upon which we can maybe speak slightly differently about the kind of work that we're trying to do in terms of really paying attention to our intimate relationships with our non-human relatives.
00:27:56.900And those can take many different forms.
00:27:58.520So one of my PhD advisors was Donna Haraway.
00:28:01.540And so a lot of her other students were also really into human dog relations.
00:28:07.080You know, those are not the relations that I pay attention to.
00:28:09.340The relations that I pay attention to are sort of my orientation on the prairies. I need flat land and big sky. Mountains jostle me around. I'm agitated and uncomfortable in mountains. I'm agitated and uncomfortable near the ocean. It's not that those are the wrong landscapes, but they're not my formative landscapes. They're not my near and dear relatives in the same way.
00:28:30.960I really, really, really need to be on the prairies for a significant amount of time. And a lot of that has to do with the ratio of land to sky. It's got to do with the violence and the tumultuousness of the skies, I need to have storms, you know, I need to have just the kind of personality and topography that the prairie has both land and sky. And so those are the relations that make that make me feel at home.
00:28:52.320Now I could write about that as a form of eco-sexuality like Beth and Annie do.
00:28:56.000You know, they talk about cloudgasms, but I don't need to do it in quite that way.
00:28:59.680There's other language that I can draw on.
00:31:35.920And it produces so many children that are, you know, I think about, you know, I'm not one of those people that ever had a biological drive to reproduce. And I know there are people like that, no matter their gender, my cisgendered ex-husband had a strong, strong desire to have a child. Why? Because he wanted to love and caretake that child. That's probably a good reason to have a child, right? Like he just wanted a person to love and caretake.
00:32:02.420And so, you know, because I had the uterus and he didn't, I did it, but I laid down a set of conditions because I never aspired to be a mother. And I had nieces and nephews who I just adored and spoiled. And I was raised by a great grandmother who completely adored and spoiled me. It's not that I knew I wouldn't have that kind of orientation to a baby, but it just wasn't a drive that I had to be a mother.
00:32:26.100And so, but because I had such a dedicated, loving co-parent, I was able to, I didn't mean to do an experiment, but in a sense, it was an experiment, right? We brought this, this human being into the world. And I've been able to think with that all these years, you know, and I really do think about the choice that people should have, but not just, it's not just about individual choice either, because, you know, we can fight for individual choice, right? We can fight for reproductive rights.
00:32:49.360But the broader choice is really hampered in our society by this term mother. I prefer the term caretaker because there's all this baggage that goes along with I'm a mother. I identify as a mother. What kind of mother are you?
00:33:02.180And so I think it's really good to, again, get away from that kind of individualistic identity, those individual expectations, to be thinking more about how we raise these human beings, these little humans in community, right?
00:33:18.320The mother, in some senses, is not always as central once she gives birth to that child, is not always as central as the grandmothers are, and often the aunties are.
00:33:27.180There's always those people that kind of step in quite often and do that work.
00:33:31.900So every single child that one brings into this world, there's a cost.
00:40:38.860I mean, they've had people that we would now call cisgendered men probably having sex with one another.
00:40:44.080But it's just, it's so difficult to talk about these things when you're using a language that did not belong to those people.
00:40:49.480when you're using kind of hierarchies and standards of civilization that did not belong
00:40:53.960to those people. So you do the best that you can, but I am not a fan of unproblematically
00:41:02.280transporting contemporary categories of sexuality into the past or necessarily onto other cultures
00:41:08.360that have their own terms in their own languages for how they are relating to one another and may
00:41:14.260not have had these kinds of discrete objects called sexuality at all. Does that make sense?
00:41:19.480Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Well, I know we could continue on pulling the threads of this topic, but I'd really like to turn to another facet of your work in this conversation, which is thinking about indigenous erasure in terms of appropriation of identity or what you refer to as representational assault.
00:41:42.180Now, there are so many different ways to approach this conversation, whether it's Native American
00:41:47.240mascots or the popular claim of Cherokee ancestry or the inability to acknowledge stolen lands.
00:41:53.860But an area that I'd really like to ask you about is how you see this happening in terms
00:41:59.800of genetic science and its commodification.
00:42:03.300How does the growing market for genetic-based ancestry tests reflect the United States'
00:42:08.760necessity for indigenous DNA. And how is this appropriation in pursuit of multiculturalism
00:42:15.480a form of erasure? Oh, my. I think largely the, and I've written about this extensively,
00:42:23.260the human population genetics research that happens within the academy and other research
00:42:27.920institutions, and then it's commercialization in the form of genetic ancestry testing,
00:42:33.300those tests that you see advertised on television and on the internet, and you can buy on the
00:42:36.980internet. Both the academic research and the commercial project are really trading heavily
00:42:44.020in this notion of the vanishing native, the disappearing Indian. And that is a motif that's0.83
00:42:49.960been around, I think, I mean, really since the beginning of colonization. The Dakota historian
00:42:55.260Phil Deloria, who's at Harvard now, went there from Michigan a few years ago, has a book he
00:43:00.340published in 1998 called Playing Indian, which traces that history. Now, Deloria doesn't talk
00:43:06.580at all about DNA in that book. He's really looking at the rise of Native American mascots,
00:43:11.720of the role-playing Indians in fraternal orders, and the Boy Scouts, and the New Age movement.
00:43:18.360But those things are all related to the way that the genetic ancestry testing industry and academic
00:43:23.540research also take up this notion of a vanishing Indian. And so the Indian must always be vanishing.0.99
00:43:28.120D.H. Lawrence wrote about this, and Phil Deloria quotes him in that book. The Indian must be1.00
00:43:32.180vanishing, because until the Indian vanishes, the American project is an incomplete project.0.88
00:43:37.000It produces too much cognitive dissonance to have Indigenous people alive and well in the0.56
00:43:42.040center of your country that is built upon, in part, Indigenous genocide. And so there's this
00:43:47.860constant need to disappear us, you know, constantly in the mascot issue and appropriating Native
00:43:53.300identity as part of disappearing us. Oh, they don't exist anymore. There's so few Natives around,0.72
00:43:58.500You know, nobody really cares. There's nobody to be offended by this mascot issue. Who's really offended? Just these lefty liberal social justice warriors. There's no real Native people offended by this. You know, the fact that people will walk around saying they have a Cherokee princess great-grandmother without even thinking about it means they probably don't think there's any actual Cherokee people in the room to dispute what they're saying.1.00
00:44:19.320The thing is, Native people are everywhere. Don't open your mouth and say something ridiculous about Native people when you're off sitting in some cafe in Boston, because chances are there's some tribal person sitting around you. We're still here. So there is just this need to produce this kind of stereotypical, you know, in a headdress stereotype of a prairie indigenous person from the 19th century.
00:44:40.020I mean, the fact that people don't, when you talk about a native person, you know, you talk about a quote unquote Sioux or a Cherokee or whatever, what comes into your head? Does a guy in a business suit, you know, working as a tribal attorney come into your head? Does an incredible basketball player and athlete come into your head? Does a college professor come into your head? No, probably what comes into your head is a Pocahontas stereotype or a Plains Chiefs stereotype, right?
00:45:03.160And that tells you that people think we are only in the past, we don't really exist anymore. And those motifs still get taken up in the service of people making claims now through DNA. And so I don't see a lot of difference between dressing up as an Indian at a Redskins game, and what Elizabeth Warren was doing.
00:45:18.860These are both appropriating an Indigenous representation based on this kind of implicit or unstated idea that we're really not around very much anymore, that we really are this 19th century relic, this image of the American past that can be used to shore up the sort of historical claims of the U.S. and Canada.
00:45:36.660Mm hmm. I really appreciate how you provide such a thoughtful critique on the multicultural state as nothing more than a mere tolerance, which really solidifies the nation state and liberal settler society.
00:45:52.860And I also know that for many, the critique of multiculturalism will hit hard because it confronts what so many of us have thought to be enough for far too long.
00:46:04.040Yet what you situate as an alternative is being in good relation and making kin with indigenous communities.
00:46:10.800So I'm wondering if you can share with us how kinship can be an alternative to liberal multiculturalism.
00:46:17.300Well, if you're advocating multiculturalism, incorporation into whose project?
00:46:22.860You know, like, just the assumption that the US or Canadian project are the good project, we didn't ask to be incorporated into you all. And African people were kidnapped, you know, and brought over and forced into this, this kind of citizenship project as well, eventually. And then we're all supposed to clamor for acceptance and belonging and incorporation into this, give me a break.
00:46:41.240You know, meanwhile, you've got the sort of, especially in the case of the US, this militaristic, violent, contaminating state going around the world, you know, killing people, producing environmental conditions that are decimating non-human populations.
00:46:56.860And so the civilizational project of the state is inherently violent and multiculturalism is not going to get us out of that. What? We want to rainbow up the U.S. militaristic empire? That doesn't sound great to me. It doesn't sound great to a lot of people around the world. As inclusive as you might get within the U.S., that's excluding a whole lot of people. And it's, of course, on the backs of a lot of non-human relatives.0.56
00:47:17.920So I'm a critic of patriotism in all of its forms.0.98
00:47:21.120I don't care if it's a right-wing patriotism or if it's one of these liberal multicultural
00:48:02.180So my allegiance is to the planet, right?
00:48:04.040And again, that's within a context of I'm better working in a particular location for
00:48:08.760sure, but I just can't have allegiance to a nation state.
00:48:13.120I can't because it just excludes too many people.0.99
00:48:16.220And so I think multiculturalism is still kind of not examining the allegiance to the nation state. And you see this in particular in Canada, where it views itself as the more ethical, gentle alternative to that big, bad, militaristic power to the north, right?
00:48:29.480and Canadian multiculturalism is held up as this better alternative to what they perceive as a
00:48:34.180greater racism in the United States. But I don't really see it that way because it's still this
00:48:38.600assumption of making a colonial state that's based on an appropriation of Indigenous homelands,
00:48:45.320you know, making that more multicultural.0.94
00:48:59.480you can't pave your way to the promised land
00:51:21.900indigenous queer and two-spirit people who are thinking a lot about human land relations and
00:51:26.760what we might call indigenous ecoerotics, although that might not be the term that they use.
00:51:31.580People thinking about defending sex worker rights, people thinking about tying the exploitation of
00:51:37.100indigenous land and its decimation in violation to the assaults on indigenous women, right? And so
00:51:43.740there's a lot of human, non-human connections that are happening implicitly in the decolonial
00:51:48.460sexualities and the kind of sexuality rights stuff that's happening across Canada and across
00:51:53.600indigenous communities in the US. And so TP Confessions happened at a really great time
00:51:58.480where we talk openly and positively about sex and sexuality. But we also have moments that are
00:52:04.240really moving where people talk about overcoming sexual trauma and getting to a place of positive
00:52:08.640sexuality. And we are really clear in our show, even though it's fun and we laugh a lot and we
00:52:14.140have a lot of salacious, sexy stories that we are an important part of what we're trying to do is to
00:52:19.200recuperate indigenous sexuality after it has been such a target of the church, the state and
00:52:24.220science. They have demeaned indigenous bodies, demeaned indigenous communities, portrayed us0.92
00:52:29.180as sexual deviants, all in their civilizing colonial project. And part of us recapturing
00:52:35.500sexuality for ourselves and pushing through is to get us back into this sense of being in good
00:52:41.120relation. And so it's why I talk about sex and sexuality as one way of being in good relation.
00:52:46.840It's not necessarily the only way or the best way or the most privileged way. Some people don't want
00:52:52.060to have sex. That's fine. All of us relate to other people, whether we do it sexually or0.99
00:52:57.740non-sexually and so we're at the center of our show and then at the center of our broader arts
00:53:03.200based research group which we've called the relab is uh to think about being in good relation and so
00:53:08.340our group we decided to call relab because we were always we noticed we were always using rewords
00:53:13.480re-story research reclaim resurgence you know think about all the rewords you can and these
00:53:19.780were kind of coming up in a in a lot of our our work and so we decided to do tp confessions to
00:53:25.820do indigenous burlesque, we could also work some kind of environmental work into this broader
00:53:30.700research group. We just had a symposium this fall, where we had say presentations, we had a
00:53:35.880presentation by a graduate student here at University of Alberta, who's working on hide
00:53:40.280tanning as a form of a cultural resurgence and revitalization and making good relation. How do
00:53:45.320you make good relations among women and people that are doing hide tanning? What are the indigenous1.00
00:53:49.560protocols for having good relations with the animals who are giving their bodies, you know,
00:53:53.040And so there's what we're finding is even that though we're trying to get away from the words nature and sexuality within the re-lab, when we're talking about restoring, researching and reclaiming indigenous relations and non-human relations, our projects tend to be about, quote unquote, sex and nature.
00:54:09.980And that's what we're doing in that research lab right now.
00:54:12.960And TP Confessions, the show is only one part of that.
00:54:15.620There's a lot of other graduate student projects that are happening and can happen through that research group at the University of Alberta.
00:54:21.660Oh, Kim, you just inspired me to ask you one more question. You got my motor going again. I know that you often cite how decolonization is not solely an individual choice, and it requires collective opposition of a system. And now more than ever, we're really in the midst of the collapse of American society.
00:54:44.180And so kind of going back to the beginning of our conversation or the first half, I'd
00:54:48.780love to ask how working with intimacy and sexuality as an entry point to being in relation
00:54:53.900encourages us to find ways outside of the colonial structure in a manner that's embodied.
00:54:59.580And how does this individual act still contribute to the collective opposition of an unsustainable
00:55:08.320Yes, the decolonization is not an individual act.
00:55:11.020So I pay really close attention to how we define decolonization, and we can't just use it to mean any kind of social justice project or any kind of opposition.
00:55:18.740Decolonization is about giving land back.
00:55:21.520It's about restoring indigenous land and life.0.77
00:55:24.600You can't get around that if you really want to do that work.
00:55:28.200So part of doing that, I think thinking about being in good relation is who are we relating to and how.
00:55:34.420So a lot of times when Indigenous people talk about land back and decolonization, and I'm thinking particularly about what Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang write in their article, Decolonization is Not a Metaphor. Again, it's about the restoration of Indigenous land and life. That doesn't mean that you're asking everybody to leave.
00:55:52.940see settler colonial thought always assumes that indigenous people, that decolonization means that
00:55:58.120we're going to do to other people what was done to us. That's not the case, right? If you're
00:56:04.580promoting being in good relation, it's not only developing relations with us as indigenous peoples,
00:56:09.420as first peoples, but it's also about developing your relationships with this place, right? And
00:56:14.320so I think learning how to relate with one another, and I do emphasize good relations,
00:56:19.360but they're not always good relations. You know, we don't always get it right. We try to get it
00:56:23.840less wrong, as Donna Haraway says, or Sandra Harding says, you know, we're not about being
00:56:28.440right, we're about being less wrong. And the way you are less wrong is by trying and trying again,
00:56:33.120right? And try in the actual practice of relating and figuring things out with one another. So
00:56:38.500our sexual relations can be part of that. But I think it's really a focus on relations more
00:56:43.660broadly. But I think that's, I think that's only part of what you're asking. But so that's kind
00:56:49.000of what I mean when I'm talking about decolonization, people throw the word around a lot. And I think
00:56:53.420people should be clear that what we mean is that something has to be restored. We can't just all
00:56:58.360agree to get along. There actually has to be a transfer of resources, right? And resources is
00:57:04.300a problematic word, but that's the word we're working with in English. You know, we're actually
00:57:07.820talking about relatives. I mean, if you look at the statistics show that the greatest amounts of
00:57:11.720biodiversity happen to be in indigenous lands, right? There is an important tie between indigenous
00:57:18.060worldviews and ontologies and protecting our non-human relatives on this planet. Those are
00:57:23.440important ties. Those relationships between Indigenous peoples and our historic homeland
00:57:28.300should not be violated. They should be cultivated. And other non-Indigenous people should come into
00:57:35.180cultivating those relations with us. That's what we need to figure out how to do, right? And there1.00
00:57:39.780are a lot of other thinkers that are much farther along than I am in terms of thinking about how we
00:57:44.020do this work. I'm thinking of Indigenous environmental thinkers and activists all over
00:57:48.060the world, right? People that are actively thinking about how to restore those relations.
00:57:52.160We've got a lot of people in lands now occupied by Canada, Indigenous and non-Indigenous allies
00:57:57.160who are thinking about doing land-based education and land-based projects. There's a lot of that
00:58:03.160going on up here. That student I was talking about who's doing the high tanning workshops.
00:58:07.240It's part of the work that she does too. So there are people thinking on the ground about how to
00:58:11.940actually put these forms of a better relating into place. I tend to theorize about that kind
00:58:17.720of work. Did I touch on everything you asked about? You touched on so much in this entire
00:58:22.900interview. And I feel like I'm going to need a lot of time to sit with our conversation because
00:58:31.260we were able to span so many different topics and give space to these concepts because I think,
00:58:40.660especially in this culture we're so used to clickbait or just this instant gratification
00:58:45.300or swipe culture we're just like oh yeah yeah headline okay next next next next but everything
00:58:49.860we talked about there's no next it's sit and stay and listen and breathe and really try to take it
00:58:56.620all in because it's in the fabric of these lies that we've been told since the moment we were born
00:59:06.520and maybe even before that. So, yeah, it's a whole shattering of this dominant identity.
00:59:15.880Yeah, I mean, there are justifications for extraction, right? You can call them lies
00:59:19.000versus truth, but there are justifications for extracting. There are justifications for
00:59:23.540hierarchy. And if we don't want to live in a hierarchical extractive world, we've got to find
00:59:28.740justifications for not doing that, right? So it's when we were talking before we started recording
00:59:34.020about the truth, right? And you saying that you heard truth in what I was writing. I mean,
00:59:38.820it's not that I don't have more research to do, right? I have more observations to make.
00:59:42.580I have more archival work to do. But for me, the truth is not in some kind of form of ultimate
00:59:48.940transparent truth about the universe. I don't believe in that. I don't know that to be how
00:59:54.380the world works. To me, the truth is in our intentions to connect and our intentions to
01:00:02.040relate with one another. And I think as long as we keep focused on that intention, we will sometimes
01:00:07.620get it less right than we could get it, right? And this is what I was saying. I think I've learned
01:00:12.180from Donna Haraway and Sandra Harding and other feminist epistemologists that we're not trying to
01:00:16.860substitute some other great feminist truth for the great white masculinist truth. We're trying
01:00:21.620to get it less wrong. And the way that we get it less wrong, the way that we have a more textured
01:00:27.700and nuanced understanding of what's working in the world and how, is by relating to one
01:00:32.940another, by having multiple eyes and minds thinking together on how to live in this world
01:00:47.820And so if my intention is to relate and to justify living well together, then there's
01:00:53.020room for me to misstep a little bit and not quite get it right.
01:00:56.860So that's what I'm trying to do. You know, I know that I, sometimes I use the wrong words. Some of the things that I really fight against are I fight a lot against ableism in my language and gender binarism, because that's so deeply embedded. You know, I don't have as much trouble with racist language, because my mom had me working on that from the time before I could read. She was very anti-racist.
01:01:18.020But these other things I have to work on, right? And I continue to work on them. And sometimes I mess up, quote unquote, but it's by staying there in conversation that I'm going to get it less wrong as time goes on.
01:01:29.020well that's a good lesson for all of us to take away from this too is how to keep striving to be
01:01:37.480less wrong but realizing that we're all going to be making mistakes and the language that we've
01:01:43.840been given in this dominant culture doesn't come close to the issues that we're really trying to
01:01:50.100get to the heart of so Kim this has been such a expansive and exciting and challenging conversation
01:01:59.680I've really enjoyed all of the twists and turns that we have gone down together and I hope to
01:02:05.360have another conversation in the future because I know this is just the beginning and we've just
01:02:09.540barely scratched the surface of the depth of your work so thank you for sharing this time with us
01:02:14.620today. Oh, you're welcome. Thank you. Thank you for listening to another episode of For the Wild
01:02:29.180podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. The music you heard today was from M83, Phrasey Ford, and Phrase.
01:02:36.940I'd like to thank our podcast production team
01:02:40.780If you haven't already, please rate us on iTunes
01:02:56.560sign up for our newsletter at forthewild.world