00:02:19.040So 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.
00:02:33.660or at least if you could clarify for listeners how monogamous marriage really takes hold in this
00:02:41.140country in the 19th century and why we must understand the institution of marriage as a tool
00:02:47.240of settler colonial nation building. So I work between the U.S. and Canada and I'm from the
00:02:53.100United States but I now live in Canada. I've been up here since 2015 and so I've had some opportunity
00:02:58.420to think a lot about the interconnections and the way that colonialism happened between the two
00:03:02.480nation states. And also historically, my people, Dakota people, were moving across landscapes that
00:03:08.460are now occupied by the U.S. and Canada when that border wasn't there, right? And even post-contact,
00:03:14.180Dakota people moved into Canada because they were fleeing the U.S. military in the 1860s when the
00:03:20.080reservation era was really kind of in full swing. So there is a lot of back and forth,
00:03:23.520both historically and today. And a lot of lessons learned between those two countries.
00:03:28.360So yeah, there's a lot of lessons of colonization, I think, taken between the two countries.
00:03:32.480And very similar kinds of processes happen. So 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.
00:03:50.960So the colonization is a very elaborate project, right? And one really driven by the rise of the nation state in the 19th century in North America, the civilizational project, the project was to make good citizens, Indians, quote unquote, were standing in the way of that.0.95
00:04:06.360So you had a real drive to break up the collective Indigenous land base into private property and private allotments. And 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.
00:04:22.480And so what they want to do is find a way to attach individual parcels of land to individual names. And 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.
00:04:40.980So what they have to do is turn the remaining Indians that haven't died or been massacred into these good private property-owning citizens. And once they dissolve the collective land base into private parcels and give 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, when all of that land has been assigned to the Indians, to the individual nuclear families that they're also making,0.56
00:05:07.760they can then disperse the excess land to settlers that are flooding in from Europe with all of its0.92
00:05:13.420problems that it's having, right, and sort of expelling its excess population because of the
00:05:18.600kinds of political economic problems that they're having. So part of dissolving the collective land
00:05:23.820base is the constitution of the nuclear family. So this is remaking and disrupting Indigenous0.97
00:05:28.140kinship relations, which do not occur in these little heteronormative nuclear families. Part of0.76
00:05:33.700making the nuclear family is to promote the idea of state-sanctioned marriage. And so this is where0.93
00:05:38.100you see the church and the state really working in concert with one another. A lot of times,
00:05:42.320contemporary non-monogamists will say, oh, they have some vague idea that religion is the central
00:05:46.660problem. Well, religion has always worked with the state. So the state was also dead set on imposing
00:05:51.440state-sanctioned one-on-one heterosexual monogamous marriage because it helped
00:05:55.360its private property goals, right? And it helped make this notion of the good citizen. And so this
00:06:00.620is happening in the mid to late 19th century. And it's not only Native people, of course,0.53
00:06:04.580who are being forced into these heteronormative monogamous nuclear families, it's immigrants
00:06:09.020coming from other cultures that have more extended and diffused kinship relationships that are0.79
00:06:13.420practicing non-monogamy. And so the Canadian historian Sarah Carter has a really interesting
00:06:18.500book on the imposition of monogamy onto Native people and other populations in Canada in the
00:06:23.860mid to late 19th century. There's another historian in the US, forgetting her name right now, but I'll
00:06:30.000come back to it, who also writes about a similar kind of project in the United States. So it does
00:06:34.100happen to be women, probably self-declared feminist historians who are writing about this
00:06:38.000project. So that's the kind of history that underlies largely what I'm talking about in
00:06:42.840my work. There's another also influential body of thinkers that Angie Willey talks about in her
00:06:48.400book, Undoing Monogamy, that came out a couple of years ago. And Angie Willey, who is at the
00:06:52.440University of Massachusetts at Amherst, I believe, writes about the work of sexologists in Europe
00:06:58.480At 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. Arranged marriages are considered to be something from these less evolved cultures. And so you've got this real kind of ideology of individualism, right, an individual choice that's going along with the promotion of marriages for love, and these kinds of marriages.
00:07:22.800And so she writes a lot about that, about how sexologists and science were also kind of central to this civilizational project that's shoving monogamy and marriage down our throats. So here you've got the church, you've got the state, and you've got science. And 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.
00:07:43.440well to continue opening up this conversation i'd love to share with listeners an excerpt from
00:07:51.260your blog the critical polyamorist wherein you write quote at a giveaway we do them often at
00:07:58.140powwows the family honors one of our own by thanking the people who jingle and shimmer in
00:08:03.460circle they are with us we give gifts in both generous show and as acts of faith insufficiency
00:08:10.180one does not future hoard we may lament incomplete colonial conversions our two little bank savings
00:08:17.820the circle we hope will sustain we sustain it not so strange then that i declined to hoard love
00:08:26.140and another's body for myself i cannot have faith in scarcity i have tried it cut me from the circle
00:08:33.360end quote. Wow. So Kim, can you begin by sharing with us how the politics of marriage,
00:08:42.600sex, and family is deeply entwined to notions of scarcity and abundance? And can you also speak to
00:08:49.720the sustainability that is inherently built into this sort of abundance? Yeah. I think when I wrote
00:08:56.200that, that's one of my hundreds. I write these 100 word creative nonfiction vignettes that are
00:09:00.820another way for me to, it's maybe a kind of ethnographic writing, but it allows for further
00:09:05.780anonymization. And they're also just really generative for my thinking. I found that writing
00:09:10.360in a more poetic voice is similar to writing in a theoretical voice. It's the same kind of
00:09:15.200wordsmithing and conciseness that you're looking for in precision. So it's really a good format
00:09:20.180for writing. And I think when I wrote that one, I was thinking a lot about Thomas Princeton's book,
00:09:24.800The Logic of Sufficiency, that came out about 10 years ago, in which he argues that sufficiency
00:09:29.380should be enough that we need to get away from this notion of a constant economic growth. This
00:09:34.000is not sustainable for the world. And I was thinking a lot about how the culture that I
00:09:39.080come from, when you look at our oral histories and the ways that we understand our ancestors
00:09:44.160lived before private property, before the disruption of our collective land holdings,
00:09:48.860to have sufficiency was enough, right? And also the fact that we moved a bit, we moved around,
00:09:54.160we migrated kind of in a circular fashion through our homelands and territories, you know,
00:09:58.720depending on the season and which resources we needed at which time of year, right? So there's
00:10:03.700a sort of circle that's happening in these migratory routes. And of course, there's visiting
00:10:07.880people along the way, but you can't be a hoarder of a whole bunch of stuff when you're, you know,
00:10:12.380moving around like that. Not that we didn't have household goods and things like that. But so I was
00:10:16.920thinking a lot about that kind of history and thinking about how that might impact the way that
00:10:21.880we think about love and family. And we know that for Dakota people, we were a non-monogamous people.
00:10:28.060Now, the church and anthropologists are very complicit in disrupting our knowledge today that we might have of the way that our ancestors had romantic relations as we want to think about them now or how they had sex, the kind of family forms that they lived in, right?
00:10:43.940So it's a bit hard to know all of the details of how people actually practice their non-monogamy, because this was a central target of the church and the state, right? This is a central way in which they portrayed our people as uncivilized, as savage, sexually promiscuous, you know, Native women like Black women have been targeted for hypersexualization, and our cultures have been viewed as promiscuous and not adhering to the kinds of civilizational standards that white supremacy likes to shove onto all of us.
00:11:12.260So there has been a bit of a loss of knowledge as well as the church really targeted sexual and family practices. But we do know that it was possible for men to have multiple wives. We don't know to what degree those relationships were always sexual because there was a practice among Dakota people, sometimes a man marrying his wife's sisters, say if their husbands were killed or they needed taken care of.
00:11:34.860So you don't know to what degree a wife also was wed to this notion of sex, right?
00:11:39.260Like now we tend to think about marriage being the companionship, being the person you co-parent
00:11:43.860children with, being the person that you have a financial partnership, and that person's
00:11:47.460also supposed to fulfill all of your sexual needs.0.64
00:11:49.900So all of these diffuse sets of relations get objectified into this one role of wife
00:11:57.400We know that men could have multiple wives.
00:11:59.460We also know that the women owned the household goods and the teepee.
00:12:02.340often men would go to live with a wife's family. Women had a lot of flexibility in leaving an1.00
00:12:08.500abusive relationship. So we do have some knowledge. We don't know how sex worked necessarily. We also0.99
00:12:13.240know that we had, maybe there are some people that have studied this more than I have. So I'm
00:12:17.300also presently trying to figure out what I can get access to in the archives. Of course, you have
00:12:21.980to read all of that through the anthropological gaze of the late 19th and early 20th century.
00:12:26.560And that's kind of problematic, but we work with what we have. We had more genders than just two.
00:12:31.300We were not a gender binary culture. Settlers also, this is well documented in the historical
00:12:36.280and anthropological record that settler colonial thinkers and states people really targeted
00:12:40.600people who lived outside of a gender binary. We have a term in our culture called winkte,
00:12:48.160which is not directly mappable onto LGBTQ or queer, but it's somebody who could occupy maybe
00:12:55.200a different gender role than the sex that they were born into. And many indigenous peoples across
00:13:00.660the Americas have these multiple gender roles, right? And also engaged in what we would today
00:13:05.420consider same-sex practices. So if you have these kinds of more diffuse relations and people being
00:13:12.060responsible for the caretaking of a wider variety of relatives, and even maybe sometimes taking
00:13:17.860additional wives because of that caretaking imperative, you can begin to see where this is
00:13:22.560a much more caretaking and sustainable culture. You do not have this notion of the individual family
00:13:27.900that is headed by this heterosexual couple, and the couple must be preserved at all costs.
00:13:33.700And so the couple, in a sense, becomes really fetishized. I find this really unsustainable.
00:13:37.260So couples have to stay together at all costs. We have this thing that we call a broken family
00:13:42.020or a failed family. There wasn't really that kind of concept in our culture because there
00:13:47.060were aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins, and there were always relatives around.
00:13:51.420And we had ways adopting relatives too. We still have adoption ceremonies to adopt
00:13:55.520non-biologically related kin. So there was always this imperative to make family and make kin.
00:14:00.480There are always people around that you needed to take care of, and that could potentially to
00:14:03.700help take care of you. So when you live in a world like that, the couple is just not that important.
00:14:10.220And I think that has been placed too much at the center of what we consider a good and workable
00:14:13.700family now. And I find that really unsustainable. Look at our divorce rates. Look at the unhappiness.
00:14:18.080I see this in polyamorous communities, people opening up their marriages in a desperate attempt
00:14:22.820to try and find a form of intimacy and love and connection again, and also often to save a
00:14:28.340marriage so they can keep their financial partnership and their parenting partnership
00:14:31.560intact, right? So I may have gotten away from your original question.
00:14:35.820No, I think it's all interconnected. And yeah, I mean, it's like ways of being in relationship
00:14:40.900that are not on the binary. And they're not also examples that many of us have been taught or even
00:14:48.260been aware that that could even be an option. I think that's something that this dominant
00:14:52.200culture does really well, is it gives us these containers. And if you don't fit into those
00:14:57.500containers, not only are you rejected in a way, but you're also not given the space to even
00:15:05.280imagine that there are ways to live outside of these very narrow ways of relating to one another.
00:15:11.980So it's just hearing you, I'm like, whoa, okay, what would it be like? How would that feel?
00:15:16.780what are other options to be in relationship with others that is healthy and regenerative?
00:15:22.100And I'm also really interested in delving deeper into our understanding of intimacy
00:15:26.340when it comes to decolonizing sexuality. Specifically, I'm thinking about what forms
00:15:32.600of intimacy and even intercourse do we shut ourselves off from when we abide by the
00:15:38.300objectification of sex or sexuality specifically? How is expanding our understanding of consensual
00:15:45.620intimacy with all forms of community, a part of disrupting what you articulate as settler sex and
00:15:52.600the family structure? Part of what I want to do in my work, and maybe this is getting at what you're0.67
00:15:57.780saying, I really want to focus on sex and sexuality because I want us to blow it apart and get beyond
00:16:04.180it, stop fetishizing it, stop objectifying it, and stop putting it on a shelf. It's like some
00:16:09.100precious china that can only be touched under certain circumstances, right? Certain very rigid0.99
00:16:14.540circumstances, or it must be hidden away and protected. Why is there even this concept of
00:16:19.860virginity? Give me a break. How is that even a thing? I mean, fine, don't have sex, but why do0.75
00:16:25.280we have to name it and call it a thing that has to be protected? It's really strange. I mean,
00:16:30.360I know why people do it, but the sort of misogyny that's behind that. So in thinking about blowing
00:16:36.240apart sex as a thing, I think what I want us to do is to realize that it's one way of relating.
00:16:40.500So one of the sets of people that I've been learning a lot from that have been making me think a lot in the last few years are asexual polyamorists or just asexual people in general.
00:16:50.940A lot of the asexual polyamorists I meet, obviously, I meet them at conferences and things.
00:16:56.280They have multiple forms of intimacy and love like I have as somebody who's not asexual, but they don't necessarily have to have what we consider genital sex, right, or the various forms of quote unquote sex.
00:17:08.320they don't have to have that necessarily as part of their intimacy. It doesn't mean that they don't
00:17:12.360fall in love. It doesn't mean that they don't like cuddling or touch or need those kinds of
00:17:16.920relating. And sometimes they might even have sex, but it's not necessarily the same driver that it
00:17:22.740is for a lot of us. So they have actually just really taught me a lot about being in good
00:17:27.000relation and what that might look like. And you know, sex can be one form of intimacy. But so is
00:17:31.940conversations, so is cuddling, so is looking into each other's eyes, so is sharing resources,
00:17:36.620You know, so is talking to one another, kindly listening to one another, reassuring one another.
00:17:42.380Sex can be one among many ways of relating.
00:17:44.780And I think if we come to look at it in that way, we can understand that we might want to be sharing it instead of hoarding it.
00:17:50.860And we can focus more on consent, right?
00:17:53.140Sex is something that I think we can have in abundance.
00:17:56.600What's really important is, is it possible to have it in this kind of consensual, mutually desired way?
00:18:03.320Yeah, I'm really interested learning more from you just now about the asexual polyamorous, because I think a lot about my personal relationships with people.
00:18:16.400and there's a lot of times where folks will feel more than maybe just a friend but we're also not
00:18:23.180in a type of marriage relationship and we're also not having intercourse but we do have romance and
00:18:30.800intimacy and so much love and so much sharing with one another and there isn't a term in this
00:18:37.580culture and maybe that's a good thing that describes what we have and it's kind of hard to
00:18:42.980explain to folks who aren't willing to shed those old identities when I try to explain
00:18:49.940how I relate to people in a way that isn't so rigid. And so, yeah, I think you really spoke
00:18:57.500to all of those things. And it's interesting specifically with polyamory because it's
00:19:02.120inherently over-sexualized in this dominant society where everything is turned into sex.
00:19:07.200So I'm also curious to hear how expanding our intimacy plays a role in combating this hypersexualization of relationships beyond monogamy.
00:19:16.900You know, polyamorous, a lot of times are really trying to combat this idea that it's all about the sex, right?
00:19:21.380Because while many polyamorous love sex, including myself, you know, it is obviously not what it's all about, especially since we have asexual polyamorous, right?
00:19:30.080So again, I think if we can look at sex as just one more way of relating, and it's appropriate with some people and not appropriate with others.
00:19:36.980But I think we could expand the categories of who it's appropriate with beyond what we have, right? And this is partly what polyamorous are trying to do with non-monogamy. So I think a lot about how making small practical changes can help us think in more generous and expansive ways about who we might relate to.
00:19:56.680So we talk a lot in polyamorous communities about the terms that we give our significant others, right? As we're trying to mess with categories and get away from rigid categorizations. And so I tend to settle on the terms, you know, sweetie, or I was thinking the other day about people that are lovely to me with the word love being part of that.
00:20:15.080So when I think about who my sweeties are, well, my number one sweetie is my daughter. I just love her so much. And she's so fun. And we have so much fun together. And we laugh so much together. But my other sweeties are the people that I have intimate sexual relationships with. And then I have very good friends. And you were getting at that a little bit ago.
00:20:32.760I have friends where, as I've expanded my notions of what counts as polyamory and multiple relating, I definitely have friends where it's always resting on what would previously have been a border between platonic and romantic.
00:20:45.760But if I do away with that border, again, these are people with whom it is appropriate to have consensual, perhaps sexual relations, right?
00:20:53.220I feel like having a more expansive category or name to call people is really helpful in not
00:20:59.840getting hung up on is this romantic or is this platonic right again I always come back to consent
00:21:05.380and who is it appropriate to relate with in which particular form and if I'm focusing on that I
00:21:10.580don't need to focus on is this a real relationship is this romantic is this platonic are we quote
00:21:15.760unquote just friends I can't stand that term just friends right friends are family friends are
00:21:21.600central. It is that's such an important sustaining relationship. Don't ever say just friends,
00:21:27.140unless you mean to denigrate that relationship, right? And that's, I think what a lot of us are
00:21:31.840trying to get away from who are practicing polyamory in a more critical way. And that would
00:21:36.140often also disproportionately includes queer people. I think there's a lot of straight people
00:21:40.180who are still doing polyamory in a way that Alexis Shotwell calls monogamy on steroids.
00:21:46.360yeah I really appreciate that what you're saying about just friends and we make these
00:21:55.420relationships in a way less important by the language we use because maybe we feel like we
00:22:02.840can't use this different language because maybe that's not appropriate in the way that we've
00:22:06.780learned how we can quote appropriately relate to people and you know just reading a lot of
00:22:14.380your work, I understand that we can't talk about intimacy without talking about relations. And for
00:22:19.360our listeners, I'd love to quote directly from your essay, Making Love and Relations Beyond
00:22:24.940Settler Sex and Family from Making Kin Not Population, where you write, quote,
00:22:31.100how does the different sustenance I gain from multiple lovers collectively fortify me and make
00:22:37.000me more available to contribute in the world? If I am richly fed, what and who am I able to
00:22:44.280feed. What is possible with a model in which love and relations are not considered scarce objects
00:22:50.020to be hoarded and protected, but which proliferate beyond the confines of the socially constituted
00:22:56.980couple and nuclear family, end quote. And to kind of move into another offshoot of this question,
00:23:05.080I'd love to talk about what we can learn from earthly relations in terms of non-monogamy,
00:23:11.020or perhaps more specifically delve into the topic of ecosexuality. And so often it really
00:23:17.840feels like conversations on ecosexuality are really stymied, in large part because I'm not
00:23:24.180even sure that the English language is equipped to discuss it in full fruition. So I'm wondering,
00:23:30.720does ecosexuality inform your work? And if so, what do you define as ecosexuality?
00:23:37.880Well, you know, I'm pretty close friends with Beth Stevens and Annie Sprinkle, who are some of the more well-known ecosexual performance artists out there.
00:23:46.380And I've been thinking with Beth and Annie since 2012, when I still lived in the Bay Area.0.97
00:23:51.640And they invited me to the Dyke March one day, where they marched under the ecosexual banner.0.96
00:24:03.500so but it's been really generative for me it's not my thing but because i care about them as
00:24:10.820friends so much and because we're just in great conversation right and we have a lot of affection
00:24:14.840for one another i've been thinking generatively with them since 2012 and thinking about why is
00:24:21.820this interesting to me ecosexuality is a term but why doesn't it work for me and i came to the
00:24:27.220conclusion pretty early on even before i started theorizing why the word sex doesn't work for me
00:24:31.760That it's just growing up as a Dakota person, as an indigenous person, we already have ways of thinking about being in relation with our other than human relatives, right? In fact, in Dakota language, it's built into the language to think about non-humans as your relatives and as your kin, as nations or persons, as peoples, you 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 thought.
00:24:58.300So I can see where people who are not coming out of an indigenous language and framework in history like me need something like ecosexuality. Some people might. So that's what was my initial thought. And then I also follow the work of somebody like Melissa Nelson, who's 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.
00:25:25.280So 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. So 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.
00:25:45.440But 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.
00:26:01.740And those can take many different forms.
00:26:03.480So one of my PhD advisors was Donna Haraway.
00:26:06.500And so a lot of her other students were also really into human dog relations.
00:26:12.060You know, those are not the relations that I pay attention to.
00:26:14.320The 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.
00:26:35.940I 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 me feel at home.
00:26:57.280Now, I could write about that as a form of eco-sexuality like Beth and Annie do.
00:27:00.960You know, they talk about cloudgasms, but I don't need to do it in quite that way.
00:27:04.640There's other language that I can draw on.
00:28:24.880Now, I'd like to acknowledge the inherent protonatalism that is built into the church
00:28:37.560and state's advocacy for monogamous marriage. And you often speak frankly and quite candidly
00:28:44.340of the sort of oppressive force of the settler family structure. So I'm hoping you can share0.99
00:28:50.740some of your thinking about biological reproduction and what forms of bonding and
00:28:55.840kinship await outside the dominant nuclear family structure? Yeah, you know, I have written and
00:29:02.940talked about this a lot. And I try to be careful because, you know, I have people that are really
00:29:09.260close to me that are implicated in these conversations, right? In particular, my own
00:29:13.360daughter and my co-parent as individuals are implicated in anything I say publicly. And so,
00:29:18.900But I have written about this a lot. Donna Haraway writes on this as well. I think there are some, I just don't think everybody should biologically procreate. I don't think everybody should have children. And I think the pressure on us, especially as women to bear children, the way this identity of mother is forced onto us as something that we should aspire to, or there's something wrong with us, so violent.
00:29:40.900And 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.
00:30:07.400And 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 the drive that I had to be a mother.
00:30:31.080And 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 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.
00:30:54.320But 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, you know, and 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?
00:31:21.160And again, my culture does that. The 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, there's always those people that kind of step in and quite often and do that work. So every single child that one brings into this world, there's a cost, there's a cost. And so you need to really be thinking about that, right?
00:31:45.040And so every new grandchild of my mother's that comes into the world, in one sense, you
00:31:50.200can say, oh, this child's really a blessing.
00:31:52.100They're each a unique and unique individual human being, and they're very much loved.
00:31:56.600But don't think that there's no cost to that, you know, because there's limited time, there's
00:32:01.380limited material resources, and you need to pay attention to that cost.
00:32:04.960And so I've really been able to sit and think with that.
00:32:07.680I mean, I would, you know, obviously, as many parents would say, most all parents would
00:32:11.360say, I would lay down my life for my child, right?
00:32:13.260as you would for any human being that you love that much. But I don't act like there is no cost
00:32:17.860to bringing another human being into the world. And I really do sit with that and think with that.
00:32:22.440And I lament that I try to do more. I'm trying to do things for my nieces and nephews, but I know
00:32:28.800that I don't do as much as I could because I put such a huge amount of resources into my own child
00:32:33.940as one is expected to as a middle-class parent, right? Thousands and thousands and thousands of
00:32:38.680you know how expensive that is so yeah I mean I'm middle class right I know poor people are
00:32:45.560sitting out there thinking please right you know my child has so much that I didn't have
00:32:49.360so much so yeah no there's so much to consider when bringing a child into this world and the
00:32:57.660resources it takes to raise a human and to be a human especially in this modern dominant culture
00:33:06.720and i think yeah i mean it's it's just mandatory for us to think through these things when we're
00:33:14.580questioning if we're going to bring a child into this world and i know people can feel triggered
00:33:20.420by that and talking about childbirth and and what it means to be a parent but if we're not willing
00:33:26.960to talk about caring capacity and you know the resources that we'll be using and like you said
00:33:33.560not just physical resources, resources about our time and how that can create resentment or
00:33:39.720frustration or a feeling of unfulfillment. I mean, these are things that really we should be
00:33:45.040talking about in community where we feel like we have the space and the trust to be able to share
00:33:50.760these fears and concerns and processes. Because I do think in this culture, it's kind of like
00:33:56.060this faux pas to even talk in this way. But then it's like, but wait, how are we not going to talk
00:34:01.600about these things when we're about to bring another human being into this world like this
00:34:06.440is this feels really important so i really appreciate you going into this and and now
00:34:13.020another theme that i've been picking up in your writing and really fall in love with is the way
00:34:19.340you articulate what we might understand as conceptual time travel and in making love and
00:34:25.980relations beyond settler sex and family, you write, quote, as I try to write this, I engage
00:34:31.900in essentially nonsensical conceptual time travel with categories that will lose their integrity
00:34:37.300if I try to teleport them back or forward in time. So much has gone dormant, will go dormant.
00:34:44.420So much has been imposed onto indigenous peoples, both heteronormative settler sexuality
00:34:49.900categories, and now also queer categories, end quote. And I can't help but think this might be
00:34:57.700something that many can relate to. And so I'm wondering if you could share with us how
00:35:02.900disaggregation provides an alternative to hierarchical categorization, wherein power
00:35:08.840is conceived anew. And how is this deeply connected to the need for different languages?
00:35:15.420Okay, the thinking about the disaggregating. So I have a section in my making cannot
00:35:19.460not population chapter from that book edited by Adele Clark and Donna Haraway, where I cite
00:35:24.220David Delgado Shorter. And the section of my chapter is called Disaggregating Sexuality and
00:35:29.740Spirituality and Reaggregating Relations. And Shorter says, and I quote him,
00:35:34.440sexuality is not, quote unquote, like power. Sexuality is a form of power. And of the forms
00:35:41.400of power, sexuality in particular might prove uniquely efficacious in both individual and
00:35:46.260collective healing. Further, I will suggest that sexuality's power might be forceful enough to
00:35:51.140soothe the pains of colonization and the scars of internal colonization. And he talks about in that
00:35:56.680piece about not getting caught in a sort of sexual identity or categories as if it's always and
00:36:03.600forever and it's unchanging. The way that we relate to other humans, quote unquote, sexually
00:36:09.580has a lot to do with who we are and who they are in relation to one another. And it's not that we
00:36:15.380don't have dominant desires. And of course, there's a lot of social construction, I think,
00:36:19.960to our desires. And I've seen that moving from being a monogamous person to a non-monogamous
00:36:24.440person. I have really been able to use my own body and sexual practices as a site of experimentation
00:36:29.540and observation. Whoa, have my desires changed? It's not that I've completely changed, but as I've
00:36:35.580been more open to more greater data, right? As I've been open to more partners and to a wider
00:36:41.420a variety of partners who have different kinds of desires and different kinds of sexualities.
00:36:46.120I've come really to realize in my own relationships as a site of experimentation and observation,
00:36:50.960how much more multiple and diverse my desires are, how much more multiple and diverse I am.
00:36:56.400And it's really about who I'm relating to and what we're building together versus am I this,
00:37:02.900am I that? And I get the strategic advantage. We need categories. I was talking to a trans friend
00:37:08.140of mine one time, and I said something really clueless, like, you know, I said, oh, I don't,
00:37:15.560why can't we just love one another, right? Like, why do we have to be in these kinds of categories?
00:37:19.940And my friend said, Kim, you sound like one of those white people who's like, why do we have to
00:37:24.440see race? I don't see race. I was like, you're right. I was really clueless. So there's strategic
00:37:30.120advantage to it. You know, we have to, we do have to have these racial categories and our sexuality
00:37:33.660categories and all of that, because we're advocating for rights. We're advocating for
00:37:37.580justice, we're advocating for resources, you know, there's that practical way. But I think there's
00:37:42.220this other kind of strategy we can have, right, which is to think in these ways about how are we
00:37:46.380relating to people as individuals, and who are we relating to? And how are we then reconstituting
00:37:51.880ourselves in relationship to one another? So that's kind of where I've come to both through
00:37:56.940my own experimentation in my own life through reading through reading theory, like that,
00:38:02.080that David Shorter talks about. And in terms of the conceptual time travel, of course,
00:38:07.180as I've thought historically about Dakota people and how they lusted, loved and made kin.
00:38:12.800I've had to think about how do I even talk about this in writing, you know, when I've got this set
00:38:17.080of English language settler colonial categories, you know, straightness and queerness and all of
00:38:21.760the LGBTQI, you know, kind of eco-sexuality, all those kinds of terms, which I have to work with,
00:38:28.920but transporting those into the deep past. I mean, you know, it's hard for us to talk about1.00
00:38:33.840that, you know, are you going to talk about the fifth in the 1500s, and indigenous people in
00:38:38.580what's now called South America, were they gay, quote, unquote, no, I mean, they've had people
00:38:45.200that we would now call cisgendered men probably having sex with one another. But it's just,0.92
00:38:49.560it's so difficult to talk about these things when you're using a language that did not belong to
00:38:53.920those people, when you're using kind of hierarchies and standards of civilization that did not belong
00:38:58.940to those people. So you do the best that you can. But I am not a fan of unproblematically
00:39:07.260transporting contemporary categories of sexuality into the past or necessarily onto other cultures
00:39:13.340that have their own terms in their own languages for how they are relating to one another,
00:39:18.800and may not have had these kinds of discrete objects called sexuality at all. Does that make
00:39:23.800sense. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Well, I know we could continue on pulling the threads of this
00:39:32.440topic, but I'd really like to turn to another facet of your work in this conversation, which
00:39:37.980is thinking about indigenous erasure in terms of appropriation of identity, or what you refer to as
00:39:44.700representational assault. Now, there are so many different ways to approach this conversation,
00:39:50.520whether it's Native American mascots or the popular claim of Cherokee ancestry or the inability to
00:39:57.140acknowledge stolen lands. But an area that I'd really like to ask you about is how you see this
00:40:03.760happening in terms of genetic science and its commodification. How does the growing market for
00:40:10.620genetic-based ancestry tests reflect the United States' necessity for indigenous DNA? And how is
00:40:17.420this appropriation in pursuit of multiculturalism, a form of erasure? Oh, my. I think largely the,
00:40:25.960and I've written about this extensively, the human population genetics research that happens
00:40:31.160within the academy and other research institutions, and then it's commercialization in the form of
00:40:36.880genetic ancestry testing, those tests that you see advertised on television and on the internet,
00:40:41.160and you can buy on the internet. Both the academic research and the commercial project
00:40:46.540are really trading heavily in this notion of the vanishing native, the disappearing Indian.
00:40:53.080And that is a motif that's been around, I think, I mean, really since the beginning of colonization.
00:40:58.780The Dakota historian Phil Deloria, who's at Harvard now, went there from Michigan a few
00:41:04.080years ago, has a book he published in 1998 called Playing Indian, which traces that history. Now,
00:41:10.600Deloria doesn't talk at all about DNA in that book. He's really looking at the rise of Native
00:41:14.920American mascots, of the role-playing Indians in fraternal orders and the Boy Scouts and the
00:41:22.020New Age movement. But those things are all related to the way that the genetic ancestry testing
00:41:27.440industry and academic research also take up this notion of a vanishing Indian. And so the Indian
00:41:32.040must always be vanishing. D.H. Lawrence wrote about this, and Phil Deloria quotes him in that0.97
00:41:35.760book. The Indian must be vanishing because until the Indian vanishes, the American project is an
00:41:40.700incomplete project. It produces too much cognitive dissonance to have indigenous people alive and0.99
00:41:46.380well in the center of your country that is built upon, in part, indigenous genocide. And so there's
00:41:52.580this constant need to disappear us, you know, constantly in the mascot issue and appropriating
00:41:58.000native identity as part of disappearing us. Oh, they don't exist anymore. There's so few natives
00:42:03.020around, you know, nobody really cares. There's nobody to be offended by this mascot issue. Who's0.99
00:42:08.240really offended, just these lefty liberal social justice warriors. There's no real Native people1.00
00:42:12.480offended by this. You know, the fact that people will walk around saying they have a Cherokee
00:42:16.420princess great-grandmother without even thinking about it means they probably don't think there's
00:42:20.600any actual Cherokee people in the room to dispute what they're saying. But the thing is, Native
00:42:25.800people are everywhere. Don't open your mouth and say something ridiculous about Native people when0.99
00:42:30.080you're off sitting in some cafe in Boston, because chances are there's some tribal person sitting0.99
00:42:34.700around you. We're still here. So there is just this need to produce this kind of stereotypical,
00:42:40.120you know, in a headdress, stereotype of a prairie indigenous person from the 19th century. I mean,
00:42:45.200the fact that people don't, when you talk about a native person, you know, you talk about a quote
00:42:48.900unquote Sioux or a Cherokee or whatever, what comes into your head? Does a guy in a business suit,
00:42:54.780you know, working as a tribal attorney come into your head? Does an incredible basketball player
00:42:59.220and athlete come into your head? Does a college professor come into your head? No, probably what
00:43:03.320comes into your head is a Pocahontas stereotype or a Plains Chief stereotype, right? And that
00:43:08.520tells you that people think we are only in the past, we don't really exist anymore. And those
00:43:13.560motifs still get taken up in the service of people making claims now through DNA. And so I don't see
00:43:18.960a lot of difference between dressing up as an Indian at a Redskins game, and what Elizabeth
00:43:23.140Warren was doing. These are both appropriating an Indigenous representation based on this kind of
00:43:28.120implicit or unstated idea that we're really not around very much anymore, that we really are this
00:43:33.64019th century relic, this image of the American past that can be used to shore up the sort of
00:43:39.560historical claims of the US and Canada. I really appreciate how you provide such a
00:43:47.580thoughtful critique on the multicultural state as nothing more than a mere tolerance, which
00:43:53.760really solidifies the nation state and liberal settler society. And I also know that for many,
00:44:00.640the critique of multiculturalism will hit hard because it confronts what so many of us have
00:44:05.840thought to be enough for far too long. Yet what you situate as an alternative is being in good
00:44:12.940relation and making kin with indigenous communities. So I'm wondering if you can
00:44:17.260share with us how kinship can be an alternative to liberal multiculturalism.
00:44:22.060Well, if you're advocating multiculturalism, incorporation into whose project? You know, like just the assumption that the U.S. 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 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.
00:44:46.220You 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.0.55
00:45:02.400And so the civilizational project of the state is inherently violent and multiculturalism is not going to get us out of that.0.56
00:45:08.060What? We want to rainbow up the US militaristic empire?0.99
00:45:11.480that doesn't sound great to me it doesn't sound great to a lot of people around the world as
00:45:15.660inclusive as you might get within the u.s that's excluding a whole lot of people and it's of course
00:45:20.440on the backs of a lot of non-human relatives so i'm a critic of patriotism in all of its forms i
00:45:26.160don't care if it's a right-wing patriotism or if it's one of these liberal multicultural patriots
00:45:31.000i can't stand it when you have democrats who think they're on the left talking about being a different
00:45:35.500kind of patriot being a patriot is not a good thing your love should not be dedicated to the
00:45:40.580nation state, it should be dedicated to your relatives. And if you are in favor of patriotism
00:45:45.080to the US, you are acting against the planet, you are acting against all of your relations.
00:45:50.520And I don't think that's a very ethical stance to take. So I don't embrace multiculturalism,0.95
00:45:55.000I just don't. Now, I realize there are pragmatic, people will say, well, there's a pragmatic kind
00:45:59.260of argument, one can make sure you go ahead and do that. But there's also this kind of macro level
00:46:03.600argument that some of the rest of us are also attempting to make some allegiances to the planet,
00:46:08.580Right. And again, that's within a context of I'm better working in a particular location for sure. But I just can't have allegiance to a nation state. I can't because it just excludes too many people. And so I think multiculturalism is still kind of not examining the allegiance to the nation state.
00:46:26.920And 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?
00:46:34.540And Canadian multiculturalism is held up as this better alternative to what they perceive as a greater racism in the United States.
00:46:41.140But I don't really see it that way, because it's still this assumption of making a colonial state that's based on an appropriation of Indigenous homelands, you know, making that more multicultural.
00:47:25.580well in closing kim i'd love to end with a question on how you're putting many of these
00:47:43.940thoughts abstractions and questions into practice which is to say not focusing on the solutions or
00:47:50.620the goals but exercising the abstract in different projects of yours like typic confessions or relab
00:47:57.580so can you share with us how these performances storytellings and creative practices are so vital
00:48:04.680to the work of unsettling so i was largely doing you know indigenous science technology and society
00:48:12.900work for the last 10 years but i used to do a spoken word before i went to graduate school and
00:48:19.720it was just a side thing, right? And then I've probably incorporated a lot of performance just
00:48:25.180into my academic stuff. I like to be on stage, and I like to give talks, and I like to perform
00:48:29.580in some sense. And those things kind of really came back together in the last few years. We just
00:48:37.260by chance started the TP Confessions Sexy Storytelling Show in Edmonton. It's an offshoot
00:48:43.540of the Austin, Texas-based show Bedpost Confessions, which has been around since about 2010.
00:48:48.580And we did it for an event, an Indigenous Masculinities Conference, the TP Confessions show back in 2015. And it came off so successfully that people asked if we would do another one. And we asked the women at Bedpost Confessions, the producers there, can we make this a regular thing? And they said, yeah, they would love that.
00:49:04.980So we do an indigenized sexy storytelling show. We've also got an indigenous burlesque troupe that has been an offshoot of our show. So a lot of different threads just kind of came together serendipitously, it seems. And there's so much happening in Edmonton and across Canada around decolonial sexualities and indigenous sexualities.
00:49:23.880We've got multiple indigenous burlesque troops. We've got indigenous queer and two-spirit people who are thinking a lot about human land relations and what we might call indigenous ecoerotics, although that might not be the term that they use.
00:49:36.260People thinking about defending sex worker rights, people thinking about tying the exploitation of Indigenous land and its decimation in violation to the assaults on Indigenous women, right?
00:49:48.500And so there's a lot of human, non-human connections that are happening implicitly in the decolonial sexualities and the kind of sexuality rights stuff that's happening across Canada and across Indigenous communities in the U.S.
00:50:00.360And so TP Confessions happened at a really great time where we talk openly and positively about sex and sexuality. But we also have moments that are really moving where people talk about overcoming sexual trauma and getting to a place of positive sexuality. And we are really clear in our show, even though it's fun and we laugh a lot, and we have a lot of salacious, sexy stories, that an important part of what we're trying to do is to recuperate Indigenous sexuality after it has been such a target of the church, the state, and science.
00:50:29.600They have demeaned indigenous bodies, demeaned indigenous communities, portrayed us as sexual deviants, all in their civilizing colonial project. And part of us recapturing sexuality for ourselves and pushing through is to get us back into this sense of being in good relation. And so it's why I talk about sex and sexuality as one way of being in good relation.0.58
00:50:51.460it's not necessarily the only way or the best way or the most privileged way some people don't want
00:50:57.040to have sex that's fine all of us relate to other people whether we do it sexually or non-sexually
00:51:03.480and so we're at the center of our show and then at the center of our broader arts-based research
00:51:08.860group which we've called the relab is uh to think about being in good relation and so our group we
00:51:14.060decided to call relab because we were always we noticed we were always using rewords re-story
00:51:19.500research reclaim resurgence you know think about all the rewords you can and these were kind of
00:51:25.180coming up in a in a lot of our our work and so we decided to do tp confessions to do indigenous
00:51:31.260burlesque we could also work some kind of environmental work into this broader research
00:51:36.160group we just had a symposium this fall where we had say presentations we had a presentation by a
00:51:41.680graduate student here at university of alberta who's working on high tanning as a form of a
00:51:46.880cultural resurgence and revitalization and making good relation? How do you make good relations
00:51:51.080among women and people that are doing hide tanning? What are the indigenous protocols for0.99
00:51:55.240having good relations with the animals who are giving their bodies, you know? And so there's,0.98
00:51:59.520what we're finding is even that though we're trying to get away from the words nature and
00:52:03.480sexuality within the relab, when we're talking about restoring, researching and reclaiming
00:52:08.160indigenous relations and non-human relations, our projects tend to be about quote unquote sex and
00:52:14.320nature. And that's what we're doing in that research lab right now. And in TP Confessions,
00:52:19.100the show is only one part of that. There's a lot of other graduate student projects that are
00:52:23.060happening and can happen through that research group at the University of Alberta.
00:52:27.180Well, Kim, you just inspired me to ask you one more question.
00:52:32.320You got my motor going again. I know that you often cite how decolonization is not solely an
00:52:38.760individual choice, and it requires collective opposition of a system. And now more than ever,
00:52:44.020we're really in the midst of the collapse of American society. And so kind of going back to
00:52:50.720the beginning of our conversation or the first half, I'd love to ask how working with intimacy
00:52:55.380and sexuality as an entry point to being in relation encourages us to find ways outside
00:53:01.180of the colonial structure in a manner that's embodied. And how does this individual act
00:53:06.740still contribute to the collective opposition of an unsustainable worldview?
00:53:10.920you? Yes, the decolonization is not an individual act. So I pay really close attention to how we
00:53:17.780define decolonization. And we can't just use it to mean any kind of social justice project or
00:53:22.020any kind of opposition. Decolonization is about giving land back. It's about restoring
00:53:27.380indigenous land and life. You can't get around that if you really want to do that work. So0.99
00:53:33.280part of doing that, I think thinking about being in good relation is who are we relating to and
00:53:39.000how. So a lot of times when Indigenous people talk about land back and decolonization, and I'm
00:53:44.560thinking particularly about what Yves Tuck and Wayne Yang write in their article, Decolonization
00:53:49.800is Not a Metaphor. Again, it's about the restoration of Indigenous land and life.
00:53:54.060That doesn't mean that you're asking everybody to leave. See, settler colonial thought always
00:53:59.760assumes that Indigenous people, that decolonization means that we're going to do to other people what
00:54:05.220was done to us that's not the case right um if you're promoting being in good relation it's not
00:54:11.340only developing relations with us as indigenous peoples as first peoples but it's also about
00:54:16.060developing your relationships with this place right and so i think learning how to relate with
00:54:21.620one another and i i do emphasize good relations but they're not always good relations you know
00:54:26.160we don't always get it right we we try to get it less wrong as donna harroway says um or sandra
00:54:31.660Harding says, you know, we're not about being right, we're about being less wrong. And the way
00:54:35.520you are less wrong is by trying and trying again, right? And, and try in the actual practice of
00:54:40.840relating and figuring things out with one another. So our sexual relations can be part of that. But
00:54:46.220I think it's really a focus on relations more broadly. But I think that's, I think that's
00:54:52.120only part of what you're asking. But so that's kind of what I mean, when I'm talking about
00:54:55.160decolonization, people throw the word around a lot. And I think people should be clear that what
00:55:00.020we mean is that something has to be restored. We can't just all agree to get along. There actually
00:55:04.860has to be a transfer of resources, right? And resources is a problematic word, but that's the
00:55:10.880word we're working with in English. You know, we're actually talking about relatives. I mean,
00:55:14.420if you look at the statistics show that the greatest amounts of biodiversity happen to be
00:55:17.980in indigenous lands, right? There is an important tie between indigenous worldviews and ontologies
00:55:24.380and protecting our non-human relatives on this planet. Those are important ties. Those
00:55:29.480relationships between indigenous peoples and our historic homeland should not be violated they
00:55:34.940should be cultivated and other non-indigenous people should come into cultivating those relations
00:55:41.500with us that's what we need to figure out how to do right and there are a lot of other thinkers
00:55:45.640that are much farther along than i am in terms of thinking about how we do this work i'm thinking
00:55:49.940of indigenous environmental thinkers and activists all over the world right people that are actively
00:55:55.160thinking about how to restore those relations. We've got a lot of people in lands now occupied
00:55:59.460by Canada, Indigenous and non-Indigenous allies who are thinking about doing land-based education
00:56:05.100and land-based projects. There's a lot of that going on up here. That student I was talking
00:56:10.140about who's doing the high tanning workshops. That's part of the work that she does too.0.91
00:56:14.720So there are people thinking on the ground about how to actually put these forms of
00:56:18.660a better relating into place. I tend to theorize about that kind of work. Did I touch on everything
00:56:25.440you asked? You touched on so much in this entire interview. And I'm, I feel like I'm going to need
00:56:32.140a lot of time to sit with our conversation because we were able to span so many different topics
00:56:40.240and give space to these concepts. Because I think especially in this culture, we're so used to
00:56:47.840clickbait or just this instant gratification or swipe culture where we're just like, oh, yeah,
00:56:52.000yeah, headline. Okay, next, next, next, next. But everything we talked about, there's no next. It's
00:56:57.020sit and stay and listen and breathe and really try to take it all in because it's in the fabric
00:57:04.720of these lies that we've been told since the moment we were born and maybe even before that.
00:57:13.260so uh yeah it's a whole shattering of this dominant identity yeah i mean there are
00:57:21.300justifications for extraction right you can call them lies or true versus truth but they're
00:57:25.420justifications for extracting they're justifications for hierarchy and if we don't
00:57:30.300want to live in a hierarchical extractive world we've got to find justifications for not doing
00:57:35.180that right so it's when we were talking before we started recording about the truth right and
00:57:40.580you sing, that you heard truth in what I was writing. I mean, it's not that I don't have
00:57:44.640more research to do, right? I have more observations to make. I have more archival
00:57:48.800work to do. But for me, the truth is not in some kind of form of ultimate transparent truth about
00:57:55.380the universe. I don't believe in that. I don't know that to be how the world works. To me,
00:58:01.680the truth is in our intentions to connect and our intentions to relate with one another. And I think
00:58:08.300as long as we keep focused on that intention, we will sometimes get it less right than we could
00:58:14.320get it, right? And this is what I was saying. I think I've learned from Donna Haraway and Sandra
00:58:18.300Harding and other feminist epistemologists that we're not trying to substitute some other, you
00:58:23.000know, great feminist truth for the great white masculinist truth. We're trying to get it less0.99
00:58:27.200wrong. And the way that we get it less wrong, the way that we have a more textured and nuanced
00:58:33.220understanding of what's working in the world and how is by relating to one another by having
00:58:39.440multiple eyes and minds thinking together on how to live in this world differently right and how do
00:58:48.420we stop justifying extraction and hierarchy and so that's that's what i'm trying to do and so if
00:58:53.260that's what if my intention is to relate and to justify living well together then there's room for
00:58:58.460me to misstep a little bit and not quite get it right. So that's what I'm trying to do. You know,
00:59:04.500I know that I, sometimes I use the wrong words. Some of the things that I really fight against
00:59:08.680are I fight a lot against ableism in my language and gender binarism, because that's so deeply
00:59:14.460embedded. You know, I don't have as much trouble with racist language, because my mom had me
00:59:18.820working on that from the time before I could read. She was very anti racist. But these other things
00:59:24.180I have to work on, right? And I continue to work on them. And sometimes I mess up,
00:59:28.700quote unquote, but it's by staying there in conversation that I'm going to get it less
00:59:32.900wrong as time goes on. Well, that's a good lesson for all of us to take away from
00:59:37.920this too, is how to keep striving to be less wrong, but realizing that we're all going to
00:59:45.880be making mistakes. And the language that we've been given in this dominant culture doesn't
00:59:51.400come close to the issues that we're really trying to get to the heart of. So Kim, this has been such
00:59:58.660a expansive and exciting and challenging conversation. I've really enjoyed all of
01:00:06.380the twists and turns that we have gone down together. And I hope to have another conversation
01:00:11.580in the future because I know this is just the beginning and we've just barely scratched the
01:00:15.920surface of the depth of your work. So thank you for sharing this time with us today.