00:01:44.940And remember, new Homebound episodes are released every Friday in addition to our regular Wednesday episode release.
00:01:55.440Welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young.
00:01:59.840Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Bronte Velez.
00:02:03.580Bronte is guided by the many rivers that have come together to make and sustain them.
00:02:08.480As a Black Latinx multimedia artist, lifelong student, and designer, their praxis, theory and action, lives at the intersections of critical geography, Black liberation ecologies, and creative placemaking.
00:02:23.680They live by the call that Black wellness is the antithesis of state violence, a quote by Mark Anthony Johnson.
00:02:31.380Their work intends to compost the violence forged by environmental racism through radical imagination.
00:02:38.360This commitment iterates through several mediums, and this year grows through Lead to Life.
00:02:44.220In their last year at Brandeis University, Bronte worked as a copy editor on a retrospective
00:03:45.180So I want to start with this feeling that's been coming up for me a lot, which is that movements towards regeneration are growing more intersectional.
00:03:54.840And I think we're finding ourselves thick within the growing pains of decolonization. There's a whole lot of work to work through within ourselves, with one another, how we treat, how we interact with our fellow humans and non-humans alike.
00:04:13.720I see these growing pains arise in many ways, and one being this circular conversation or many types of circular conversations that leave our movement stagnant.
00:04:25.360Much of the way that we communicate, much of the way we listen, remains an expression of colonial mentality, which is competitive, self-righteous, entitled, aggressive.
00:04:36.960I think we all share a common pain and loneliness, but we also absolutely do experience the system disproportionately. And to lose sight of that is a dishonor to what we're trying to grow as a regenerative culture.
00:04:54.340There's a quote from Alicia Garza, who's the founder of Black Lives Matters, in an interview with Kiyanga Yamata Taylor in How We Get Free, Black Feminism and the Kambahi River Collective.
00:05:07.860And she said it so clearly, quote, if we're going to change the way that we organize, we have to stop doing this.
00:05:16.120Like this framework of multiracial organizing is so sloppy because it allows us not to take responsibility for the ways that we also perpetuate the system, end quote.
00:05:26.420So I wanted to start by asking you, what are your feelings around these growing pains of decolonization?0.81
00:05:33.560And how do you see us becoming better organizers?
00:05:41.340I think a lot of it is rooted in the absence of rituals to practice grief and to me decolonization
00:05:49.880is a death ritual is that's what we're talking about we're talking about letting go and releasing
00:05:56.380from what we thought either for some people's what we thought we wanted and then for others
00:06:03.660what was imposed upon us and told made us citizens or worthy beings or value beings
00:06:09.820or declared that we were in fact alive and I think we're at a time in this concept of the
00:06:20.500great turning that it will require pain it will require grieving it will invoke sadness
00:06:26.620because everything we thought was true, everything we were striving for is no longer or now we know
00:06:34.920the impacts of what that old dream will impose upon the earth and other living beings.
00:06:42.440I think the growing pains with decolonization are valid. I think to be better organizers0.62
00:06:50.940will require patience. And I think the problem is that the work is so urgent. So how do we
00:07:00.740metabolize that grieving process? What do we need to do to instigate that grieving process so that
00:07:07.160we can show up to the earth and to one another urgently and slowly and how to find that quantum
00:07:15.220space to be here. And I think a lot of it can come through being transparent about the pain
00:07:24.060that we are in and like being witness and the grief that it is to shift. I've been reading a
00:07:29.980book called Conflict is Not Abuse. The author is sharing that supremacist ideology and traumatized
00:07:37.060behavior reflect one another. And it's a contentious concept that those two things reflect
00:07:43.260one another and I'm grappling with it while I'm reading the book because I'm like I deserve to be
00:07:48.760angry I deserve to be pissed I deserve to call people out I deserve to not be patient and at
00:07:54.820the same time being able to sit with the ways these responses come from a traumatized place
00:08:04.360and what do I need in community to support grieving the thing I thought I wanted grieving
00:08:11.880this world I thought I wanted to be a part of and being curious about what is possible and being
00:08:21.920okay with not knowing the future. This is why I'm really interested in decomposition as rebellion,
00:08:28.420as was mentioned, because decomposition as rebellion is saying, I don't know what is coming.
00:08:35.300I don't know what's happening. I don't know what is next. All I know is that I need to die.
00:08:41.880All I know is these things need to be laid to rest, that part I'm sure of, and how to just be committed to that, I think is a powerful practice.
00:08:51.540I think a lot of what arises in these circular, conflicted conversations and the miscommunications sometimes is actually grief in disguise.
00:09:05.280And instead of there being spaciousness around grief, it seems that the colonizer mentality has imbibed even grief with competition. Grief is either compartmentalized or expressed haphazardly. You know, it could be misdirected at others, which ends up only re-traumatizing and instigating more grief.
00:09:28.060and you know tapping into our wells of grief is raw and witnessing such can be uncomfortable
00:09:34.940so i see this need for safe spaces to really grieve where we can learn how to be around
00:09:43.700other people who are also deeply feeling their grief so i'd love to hear your thoughts on how
00:09:50.040to create spaces for communal grieving that can recognize the inequities among us while
00:09:56.600simultaneously not demeaning anyone's trauma as lesser oh yeah that was the narrative of 2017 for
00:10:07.580me witnessing a lot of spaces where people needed to be witness and the beauty the beauty and the
00:10:15.760vulnerability of transparency about like what i hear in the meta scream of grief competition is
00:10:22.500like, please see me, please love me, please support me. Somebody give me a hug. Somebody,
00:10:29.640please, somebody love the child in me. Somebody tell me it's going to be okay. Somebody please
00:10:35.860help, help chaos. Everything I thought I knew was true is no longer true. And I'm struggling.
00:10:43.480And I see that. I see that need to be witnessed. At the same time, we're in an era of so much disparity. And so I think what's happening is this dance between traumatized response and supremacist ideology is that the earth is asking us to move into recalibrating balance.
00:11:09.900and in that I moved to ecosystems where I'm like okay about balance comes through an ecosystem
00:11:18.620and that would require an ecosystem of support an ecosystem of spaces where people right now we need
00:11:26.760to be thinking about how to move on multiple timelines because there's things that need to
00:11:32.460happen urgently and there are things that need a deeper time and space to happen and some people
00:11:37.460need to be there and some people don't need to be there because realistically we can't all be in the
00:11:43.140same room at the same time truly in one room we need multiple spaces to do that work someone
00:11:50.360reframed recently collaboration is co-liberation co-liberating we need the ecosystems to be
00:11:55.840co-liberating together and I think my struggle is that we often come into one space and believe that
00:12:02.720is the space where healing is only possible. And so we demand that of that space. We demand that
00:12:09.480of the gathering that says it's about grieving. And so we won't center the people who need to
00:12:17.760be centered at this time, whose deep, long, ancient history of marginalization, their voice
00:12:25.060and their practices and liberation need to be listened to, need to be heard, need to be amplified.
00:12:31.080To me, this work around grief competition can be grounded when we practice humility. This is a big thing. I've seen a lot of spaces where people aren't willing to be humble, aren't willing to listen, aren't willing to say, hey, what are the other spaces where I can get the tending that I need to?
00:12:49.460And in this space, maybe it's not my voice that needs to be heard right now and how to be in that wisdom and discernment.
00:12:57.060And it reminds me of someone tweeting about during the whole All Lives Matter complex, that was definitely this thing we're talking about with grief competition.
00:13:07.320someone tweeted like all lives matter is like coming into a funeral and being like
00:13:14.360I too have had someone that has died and being like wait what we're trying to honor our family
00:13:22.940we're trying to just be with our family right now and to just to allow like multiple timelines to
00:13:31.540move together and I think for this work we have to transition from the concept of linearity we
00:13:37.240have to decompose linearity, and we have to be humble. There is so much there. So many threads
00:13:48.440in that response. One thing that you brought up a few times is urgency, this feeling of urgency.
00:13:57.120And I want to read a quote from Adrienne Marie Brown's Emergent Strategy that really spoke to me.
00:22:00.280this tradition that you were talking about of oppression
00:22:04.380And it really clarified this idea for me that there is a practice, a tradition, a deep intention underlying the physicality of oppression, intention behind the production of segregated urban spaces,
00:22:23.840the fragmentation and privatization of ecological webs, and the separation of us from our own bodies, from another's body, and ultimately the body of Earth.
00:22:39.960And I think about critical geography, this school of thought which you reference in your work, which speaks to such impacts of colonization and white supremacy on geography.
00:22:53.840critical geography is actually a fairly new term to me. And I imagine it might be for many of our
00:23:00.560listeners as well. So would you define critical geography and perhaps share with us how your
00:23:07.540understanding of critical geography has impacted the way you move through space?
00:23:12.820um yeah thank you i would describe critical geography as how do we practice a deeper
00:23:24.500inquiry into the ways spatialization is experienced and how do we inquire the ways
00:23:36.300mapping has occurred and the ways we relate to borders and the ways we relate to how we experience
00:23:45.320place and the ways then that we relate to our ecologies and who is where and how and for what
00:23:53.100reasons and how did they get there and what is the history of migration and movement and also then
00:24:01.980peoples over time who have been in a place, is that a choice? Is it a choice to be where we are?
00:24:09.800Have we been moved there? Have we been forced to go there? Is the movement I make in a day
00:24:15.560not decided for me? That's a big point of this question. Am I actually being moved around?
00:24:23.040Or am I immobilized? And so questions around mobility, transportation, environmental racism,
00:24:30.620ableism racism all come up here to me it's this confluence of we all are in space we're all here
00:24:39.720and we can begin to be in an inquiry about our location yeah I think for me that question
00:24:48.640around place around space has really come through with one of my teachers Dr. Jasmine Johnson
00:24:55.180who has an amazing article from San Francisco on Dear Carrie, an autobiography of gentrification.
00:25:03.760She's both writing a letter to her brother who was killed when she was a child. And she's also
00:25:09.360talking about the ways the city has changed, how San Francisco has become gentrified and how her
00:25:15.760family's bookstore, I believe is the first black independent bookstore in the nation, Marcus Books,
00:25:21.540is trying to be torn down for a condominium development and she's moving in between
00:25:29.700scholarship and narrative and history and love and poetry and is asking how does place traumatize us
00:25:42.700how does place hold memory how is memory trying to be obscured i learned this from a professor
00:25:49.680Dr. Greg Childs, for our ancestors, it's not that we weren't in the archive. It's that our
00:25:56.360histories have been erased. That is true. And then he challenges the agency of our ancestors to be
00:26:04.260like, was everyone really just a race? Or were some people actually intentionally evading the
00:26:09.960archive because what they were doing for their liberation couldn't be written down? It couldn't
00:26:15.860be remembered. It needed to happen through a corporeal experience. It couldn't be in this
00:26:22.380way we understand memory. So that happened through the body or that happened through place or that
00:26:27.500happened in relationship with the earth as an ally. And so I'm interested in that encoded memory.
00:26:35.180This concept of epigenetic trauma that's been coming up about lineages of trauma that are
00:26:40.560encoded into our DNA and that we have these responses that come from our ancestors. I'm
00:26:46.060interested in what's my epigenetic resilience? What are those responses in me that remember how to
00:26:52.480pray, how to practice freedom, how to love? What are those things in me? And to focus there and to
00:27:00.440know those memories live with the earth and how to be in the earth with that process to speculate
00:27:05.740upon things that have not been written down and that I will not be able to find in anybody's
00:27:10.040books, that they were quiet and they can't be told to me. Our initiation into hearing our ancestors
00:27:17.700maybe isn't in the ways we thought they would come in this colonial way where we thought we
00:27:24.060would be passed down the family tree. We can go on Ancestry.com and all the answers will be there,
00:27:29.900but to trust that it's in our bodies. I've been learning from my friend Tayla,
00:27:34.700the revolution will be embodied the revolution is a somatic experience it's with the living body
00:27:40.800and to learn from my own body as a site of healing and I've been learning this also from
00:27:47.700Suzanne Pierre about the body being an intervention through her work with critical ecology when we're
00:27:54.520in the earth because the ways we're supposed to see black bodies in the earth how we imagine that
00:28:00.320is a site of trauma and what is it to see black bodies playing in the ocean to be with one another0.91
00:28:09.060to be walking the fact that just even walking itself or moving or just being in place is an
00:28:17.960active intervention yeah it's really deep well perhaps continuing on that train of thought
00:28:25.960there's this narrative that seems to be prevalent today that black folks in America are alienated
00:28:34.200or estranged from nature, wild places in the wilderness. And I'd love to unpack this a little
00:28:40.640bit with you, perhaps to begin by tracing back in time, you know, the beginning of the relationship
00:28:46.880that people of color hold with the land and waters of Turtle Island was non-autonomous.
00:28:52.560and as the hands holding the whips these wealthy white people were actually severing themselves
00:29:00.080further and further from the soil and the bodies on the receiving end still lived in tune with the
00:29:06.560stars and the elements right you know was wilderness not a refuge for those evading brutality
00:29:13.320did nature only become inaccessible in modern times i like any story so much is untold omitted
00:29:21.740or convoluted purposefully so I'm wondering what's your take on this this historical narrative
00:29:28.680and what are the stories you know to be true the first thing I think of is watching a two-hour
00:29:39.020kind of conversation between two black scholars Sadia Hartman and Fred Moten at Duke Theological
00:29:46.200Seminary in a series that Duke was holding called The Black Outdoors. And somewhat towards the end
00:29:52.260is very high theory. It's also amazing the ways Black people have had to practice academia and
00:30:00.880then like shove it back in this way that's like even smarter than it ever could have been. It's0.95
00:30:05.060like so deep. You'd be like, wow, this is amazing. Like I'll take this colonized form and I'll dance
00:30:11.920with this way of knowing I'll play with it and then we'll give it back to you so reimagined
00:30:18.720and we'll actually we'll we'll show you how to be in question and that was really deep for this
00:30:24.460whole like two hours and then someone in the audience it was one of those people who like
00:30:29.200actually doesn't have a question but needs to be heard and started sharing this narrative from this
00:30:37.360text Black Aesthetics by Paul Taylor about an archive where I believe enslaved folks from
00:30:42.920Senegal arrived to the port and the trader is confused that they have stars and moons etched0.75
00:30:52.800into their head, all these black folks. And they're asking why did they have that on their head?1.00
00:30:58.400And they're like, they did that to themselves. And apparently these were people who spoke
00:31:03.260different languages and I think about that moment at the bottom of the boat what scholars talk about
00:31:10.100with transatlantic time and that period of time shift for black people coming into this place0.89
00:31:19.560and the language that you use alienation from nature it has been an alienation it's like you0.82
00:31:26.400literally coming as aliens to this other world and this moment of literally carving into the body
00:31:36.720the memory of the stars wearing it I'm imagining these people looking amazing like coming off this
00:31:45.260boat like what y'all about to do we're wearing this that moment is so deep for me and that to
00:31:51.420me is what's true, is that even if it wasn't etched in in that way, people hid seeds in their
00:31:57.780hair, seeds in their bodies. People hid memories in their bodies. People protected things. People
00:32:03.860practiced quiet in a way we can't imagine. Michel Trouillot, he talks about the language of
00:32:10.520unthinkability, that it's unthinkable for many archivists to imagine that Black people experience
00:32:19.780joy for example during slavery or that they experience freedom or that they sat and were
00:32:25.740with the sky and there's a thing Toni Morrison talks about of Phyllis Wheatley the first published
00:32:31.040black poet she says if Phyllis Wheatley writes something about like the sky is blue people are
00:32:37.540going to ask what does a blue sky mean to a black slave and that there's always that relationship0.58
00:32:43.060between the body and the earth and that they can't be separated often we are separated from0.78
00:32:49.480nature physically through design through the ways cities are designed that actually does become
00:32:56.420inaccessible to us so that narrative is true and time as a active colonization which also comes
00:33:04.420through disrupting natural rhythms of time in the history of how slavery was practiced and the
00:33:10.000carceral system of time with the idea of people doing time and taking people's time away that
00:33:16.400prevents people from being in nature you're not about to go to the woods at night you've been
00:33:20.800working all day and now you about to go to the woods like people got to work on the weekend1.00
00:33:24.900it's just like there's not that rhythm there's not that availability it's not that black people0.88
00:33:32.220don't want to be walking around and be in the earth people know it's that relationship is taken
00:33:38.260away from us and so I'm interested in like remembering that it is true that we've always
00:33:44.260been in the earth. It's true that we changed the fabric of the soil here. It's true that we
00:33:48.580developed the agriculture that has happened in the United States. We developed the system of
00:33:53.840capitalism. We didn't develop it. We were able to fuel what is now known as America through our
00:34:00.740bodies. We were traded as currency. And to feel that current, to feel that energy and that power
00:34:09.500and to reimagine, to trust that my ancestors,
00:34:12.860they were taken because of how much wisdom they held.
00:34:17.140And to remember, to challenge how we re-archives.
00:34:20.460This is what I did with my thesis at Brandeis.0.94
00:34:23.340This woman, Eliza Pickney, a white woman,
00:37:01.940And you sent me this article that I want to bring up.
00:37:07.580It's called Cosmic Literacy and Black Fugitivity by James Pandaloni Jr.
00:37:14.160and would you tell us what the idea of fugitivity means to you
00:37:20.120and share with us some pieces of this article that you feel to be pertinent to now
00:37:25.040in that article james is talking about benjamin banneker's almanacs which were also known as
00:37:35.560ephemeris where we get the word ephemeral and that which is for a day then the etymology of
00:37:43.860journey is also one day ephemeris is also that concept of disappearing of letting go
00:37:50.660and I've always been really moved by Benjamin Banneker making these almanacs and then like
00:38:01.680encoding them with these other work around black liberation and in the article he's also talking
00:38:09.720about nat turner knowing that there would be a sign in the stars and i think about harriet
00:38:18.920tubman and many other folks relationship to the north star and i think about this practice in
00:38:24.760celestial navigation and yeah this concept of cosmic literacy and something i have been writing
00:38:32.160about is decolonizing literacy. Oftentimes it's written that Harriet Tubman was an illiterate
00:38:40.260slave. And so what I want to say is a lot of scholars talk about moving out of the concept
00:38:45.720of calling folks slaves and making it an active term, activating that we're more out of the noun
00:38:53.060into the action that was happening upon these people. So the enslaved, instead of being like
00:38:58.940this person was illiterate. Actually, what literacy did she have? Wow, this illiterate slave
00:39:04.800was able to, you know, get to freedom. That's good. She was literate. She was literate. It0.74
00:39:11.700wasn't your literacy. Oh, but Harriet Tubman was literate. Harriet Tubman was literate in the1.00
00:39:18.400stars. Harriet Tubman was literate in the soil. Harriet Tubman was the only woman to lead a1.00
00:39:25.400military operation during the civil war like we just skip over that we just imagine this is just
00:39:32.520this person freeing people willy-nilly like this was happening in the winter time this was happening
00:39:38.980at night this was happening when it was cold she was also a nurse in the civil war so i'm always
00:39:45.340like this person was a herbalist so how do i start to read how she knew plants how she was a coyote
00:39:52.420How do I start looking at the way she experienced a master through a piece of metal at another enslaved person and it hit Harriet in the head?
00:40:06.680And so she was known to have had a brain injury from that experience.
00:40:11.820It said that she had hypersomnia and that she would fall asleep uncontrollably.
00:40:17.800she was moving via her dream world the way spirit and god were telling her these roots and so i'm
00:40:27.460just like wow okay that's another kind of literacy to have a spiritual literacy to have another
00:40:34.280relationship to time in the gravity of faith to know that another way is possible to be literate
00:40:41.460in imagination. When we think about the context of where Harriet Tubman was, to say that you're
00:40:48.360going to be free is so deep to decide you are free and then to make sure that everybody else
00:40:57.600is free with you. That's like, okay, whoa, that really humbles me. And Nat Turner's work with
00:41:03.880Waiting for the Sign from the Stars, it's like, okay, we're going to move as Black folks across
00:41:08.440the earth in the same time that the sky becomes black. So they were waiting, they moved on the0.99
00:41:13.420eclipse. And so to think about what Martin Luther King called cosmic companionship that we have,
00:41:21.120that is with us, that the stars are with us, that the sky is with us, that the earth is with us,
00:41:26.280that I'm thinking of Alice Walker's writing, but in truth, the earth itself has become the1.00
00:41:32.400nigger of the world and what it is to be like okay we're both this what happens to the earth1.00
00:41:38.580happens to black people and what happens to black people happens to the earth and to find that0.99
00:41:44.260communion and witnessing and I've had this experience where I was out here and these0.95
00:41:51.840fires in California and these fires are happening and I was inside of an oak in Los Padres National
00:41:58.600forest and I started weeping and I was just like dang I just felt like the earth really needing to
00:42:07.520rage only because we took away the folks who tended fire in that way for the land where the
00:42:14.660learned to burn and this pain and this tension of like that serotity has to happen this idea of
00:42:21.940things germinating by fire that it's a process that has to exist and to trust in this process
00:42:27.740And then also to see the earth in that pain of trying to come into balance and it having to be so painful of it having to be violent and that we're so imbalanced.
00:42:38.200We've taken the earth so out of balance that the only response is this way because the earth is also metabolizing their healing.
00:42:46.020And I just see the earth in that process of what we've done and just learning and just humbled and just, yeah, just really humbled.
00:42:57.740I think a lot about how the earth has been used against her or their black and brown children and how painful that is for both the children and the earth.
00:43:16.600and how you've been dispelling so much of that narrative
00:43:24.700that black and brown people are separate or they don't belong
00:43:30.460or they didn't have nature literacy or don't.1.00
00:43:37.260And it seems like if we're talking about the biology of violence,
00:43:43.640we need to also be talking about psychological or community healing and physical healing
00:43:51.640and to do that we need to talk about the way the system is designed to keep people poisoned and
00:43:59.280unhealthy and the article that you directed us to wellness and the black molecular future by
00:44:06.780mark anthony johnson names how there is feedback between the toxicity of the biological systems of
00:44:13.580our bodies and violence, calling on Flint, Michigan's lead poisoned water crisis as an
00:44:20.180example. So would you speak through your knowledge on the physiology of violence and how a physical
00:44:29.420lack of wellness and lack of access to wellness limits communal healing process?
00:44:36.300Yeah, I think a lot about Mark's article. I remember reading that when I was in India,
00:44:43.580with the spiritual ecology fellowship. Oh no, I was looking for it again. I remember I was like,
00:44:49.660there's some article that changed my life. Now can I find it again? I need to find it again.
00:44:55.440I'm trying to like, what was it called? What was it called? And I found it again. And at that time,
00:45:02.260I was so disturbed that we were with these Tibetan Buddhist nuns at a nunnery called0.99
00:45:07.860Tila Kapoor in the Himalayas and we're doing the spiritual ecology series and my friend Damaris is0.99
00:45:15.980like teaching these disaster management workshops and there are these infographics of nuns and
00:45:25.120monks with face masks on carrying out people on gurneys for inevitable landslides that are
00:45:34.540happening in avalanches and in India that are rooted in like American empire. And to think
00:45:41.280about the people who are living so close to the earth, needing to be these responders to see that
00:45:47.960was really intense. And I wasn't really paying attention because I was paying attention,
00:45:54.040but I was also happened to be reading underneath the desk, the new Jim Crow. And it was this0.53
00:46:00.260overwhelming moment of like oh my god we have really messed up this is so intense and then
00:46:07.860after that time to come back to mark's article and to think about when he references the lead
00:46:14.280poisoning in flint to begin to contemplate how is people's inaccessibility to wellness then
00:46:22.940criminalized for example if police aren't being trained to de-escalate situations and aren't
00:46:29.140trained in sensitivity to care for people with differently abled bodies? What happens if a child
00:46:36.680in the future who's been poisoned by lead for water and flint, which is a neurotoxin,
00:46:42.920then becomes later in their life criminalized in a moment of who knows what happens and is then
00:46:50.460criminalized for something that happened because there was neglect for the safety of people's
00:46:57.680water. There was neglect for the safety of people's bodies and what was entering their bodies.
00:47:03.200And it's deep that nourishment is something that's taken away from us. And yeah, I think that
00:47:10.820when he says this idea that Black wellness is the antithesis to state violence,
00:47:16.440that implies that state violence is contingent upon Black bodies not being well.1.00
00:47:21.900it means that in order for the state to stay intact in the way it is right now black people0.97
00:47:30.320have to not be healthy spiritually emotionally mentally physically that is the project of white0.75
00:47:36.740supremacy and it always has been because capitalism was built upon us not being well
00:47:43.440that's literally how it came to be and so in order for it to stay alive it has to continue that
00:47:50.900tradition. And it is one that is designed. I remember being somewhere and I was at a retreat
00:47:57.380last summer and people were like, wait, redlining? Wait, what's redlining? Wait, what's food
00:48:03.060apartheid? And Leah Penniman at Soul Fire Farm in New York has reframed food desert as a food
00:48:09.640apartheid. It's not a natural phenomenon that people don't have access to healthy food.
00:48:13.360That is designed. That has historically been designed in the urban space. It has historically
00:48:18.020been designed that the history of sanitation in the U.S. was placed in communities that were also
00:48:23.540deemed disposable. That's always been what it's been about. How do we move our impact away from
00:48:30.580visibility? How do we not have to deal with the idea that we are being harmful? And I'm really
00:48:37.360interested in how we begin to really bring that accessibility. And I'm in the beautiful humility
00:48:45.220of where we are right now. I'm from Atlanta. I don't have any organic grocery stores in the
00:48:50.360place where my family grew up. There's not organic food. And if there is, it's very limited. It's
00:48:56.220definitely an experience of food apartheid. But I've been learning from Mandela Marketplace in
00:49:01.100Oakland, like, okay, we're this one grocery store in a radius of 25,000 people that has organic
00:49:07.280food. And otherwise it's 300 corner stores that are also liquor licensed to feed these people.
00:49:13.660And it's all GMO food and all this stuff that's low vibration, that's riddled with chemicals, that is working in so many ways through advertising, through media to kill us, to shift our energy, to not have stable energy and to be like, OK, they're going to use those places that are there and they're going to put in fresh fruit, fresh produce at the front of those stores.
00:49:36.860They're going to bring the food to those places. And so like, I can't wait for my grocery store to be built. You know, I can't wait for all of that. I'm not going to deal with that bureaucracy of all of that. How do we start bringing things to be in the humility of where we are right now? How do we start suturing that proximity? How do we start bringing us closer into that availability? And bringing people together who have the medicine, who have the food, and just, yeah, making it more accessible.
00:50:04.300that's what it's about because our transportation is another part of it the design of the city
00:50:10.900especially in atlanta too the design of urban sprawl where it takes you hours to even get
00:50:16.560access to food and how to make that relationship closer and how to also share with people
00:50:21.900that they have the agency to grow their own food and to be in that security yeah
00:53:52.700responses etc and how the diet of the incarcerated and the poor which is high in sugar and low in
00:53:59.060nutrients depletes neurotransmitters and how this quote creates physiological grounds for depression
00:54:05.940anxiety and aggression and he calls then for quote an end to state violence all the way from
00:54:12.860the architecture of policing and mass incarceration down to the level of the neuron end quote so for
00:54:20.320people again that's the wellness and the black molecular future by mark anthony johnson and you
00:54:28.180brought up that you're from atlanta and i want to bring up this project that you're doing and
00:54:35.660And as we begin to heal as intersectional earthly communities, I'm curious how ceremony and symbolic remembrance can help us achieve justice, particularly in places where both the land and the people harbor intrinsic memories of violence.
00:54:54.640and in conversation at the for the wild live event you brought up the work of the equal justice
00:55:00.480initiative that quote recognizes the victims of lynching by collecting soil from lynching sites
00:55:05.840and creating memorials that acknowledge the horror of racial injustice in america end quote
00:55:11.100from what it sounds like you're hosting events this spring in atlanta that are in the same vein
00:55:17.820so would you tell us about your endeavor led to life a people's alchemy for regeneration
00:55:23.200i usually start this with sharing that my friend harry we were studying in czech republic and
00:55:32.320he sent me this glow-in-the-dark bike path um that's in the netherlands was like just sending
00:55:40.880it to me because it was this beautiful design and it looks like a bioluminescent bike path and i was
00:55:46.540just like wow and i immediately thought of my friend xavier who was killed on a bike path in
00:55:52.920Atlanta and I get into a lot of manic questions about if the conditions were different would this
00:56:03.280have happened I asked a lot of things about like okay if this had looked like this would this have
00:56:09.260happened like this and it's true I think of it as manic but it's like true that it maybe could have
00:56:16.040been different and I don't know how much that serves me to ask but it's like can we instigate
00:56:20.700new ways of relating to space? And how does what Dr. Sean Genwright calls the persistent traumatic
00:56:26.620stress environment, how does that inform our experience with violence and proximity to it?
00:56:34.240We're always experiencing trauma and we don't even have that space and time to heal. It's not
00:56:39.340even like post, it's just incessant. And he was killed on that bike path at 21, young black man,
00:56:48.980And he was killed by a 14-year-old young black person, young black child.
00:56:56.340And Alice Walker says, the most important question in the world is why is the child crying?
00:57:01.880And I kind of am in that this is the most important question.
00:57:09.160Why is a black child killing another black child?1.00
00:57:12.580And affording them that question and affording them their life.1.00
00:57:15.840and affording them the trauma they must be experiencing to inflict that degree of violence
00:57:21.420onto another being. When white kids are afforded that experience, they're afforded the question,0.54
00:57:27.320what happened to you? What happened to you to kill all these people? What happened to you to1.00
00:57:31.680walk into a church and kill nine people who were praying for you? To walk out with a bulletproof
00:57:38.580vest, for you to be on a chase and for people to still ask what happened to you and to still
00:57:43.840see you and to still feel you're disturbed, to be seen as a human and to want to give
00:57:50.340Black children that experience of being seen as children, of their trauma being witness,
00:57:55.880of this desire to be a part of capitalism and all of the nonsense that inflicts and all of the0.60
00:58:00.980mental noise that inflicts to be witness and for us to grieve that together. That we are told so
00:58:07.760much that we want this thing that we don't actually need and to make other things beautiful,
00:58:13.060to make another way of living beautiful which is interesting too about mark anthony johnson's work
00:58:18.140with the way of the diet and diet the etymology is just a way of life that's what it is and how
00:58:24.280to move out of this diet with capitalism and how to be like i don't want to be in that practice
00:58:31.320anymore and how much violence is contingent upon it and my friend was being robbed and
00:58:37.440And that story, that history, and, like, this kid going to prison and, like, these two people going to prison, the young man who was with him, is just so tender to me.
00:58:48.720It's so tender for me, for the families, because it's this persistent traumatic stress environment where everyone around me has somebody who's died, somebody who's been killed, somebody who's killed somebody else, somebody who's plotting to kill.
00:59:03.380And then, in addition to that, we're experiencing state violence, which has informed how we're killing one another.
00:59:10.000And there's not that room to memorialize the folks that we've lost.
00:59:15.080And I'm really moved right now by a dear teacher in my life, Theaster Gates, who Stony Island Arts Bank placed that he recuperated through his practice, the Rebuilt Foundation.
00:59:26.340they had the gazebo that tamir rice was killed underneath 12 years old killed by the police for
00:59:33.000holding around a bb gun no due process no question do you have a gun he's killed in like less than
00:59:39.080five seconds it looks like a child and his mother asked for the gazebo at first they were going to
00:59:48.740destroy it and she said i i want the gazebo i want it and now stony island arts bank it's not
00:59:57.260an exhibition they're calling it caretaking material memory where they have these memories
01:00:02.840of the gazebo in this space that you can barely go in and this is the sound of the aster and
01:00:09.480his mother tamir's mother in a conversation about this decision to want it and it's just all of
01:00:16.200these pieces of the gazebo the memories of the tape and the teddy bears and all of those things
01:00:21.180and I'm just interested in like transforming that landscape of trauma with led to life and
01:00:28.060the trees are also in pain from experiencing being surrogates for white supremacy literally
01:00:35.740being used to lynch black people trees don't want to do that and to be in that allyship with the
01:00:42.760trees and that accompliceship with the trees and with the soil, to know that the soil doesn't want0.99
01:00:48.800to have to take young black bodies so early, doesn't want to have to bring us into these0.59
01:00:54.220unnatural deaths, wants us to come when we're supposed to come because we've lived. And so I'm0.96
01:01:00.760excited about gathering healers in Atlanta that I really respect who've healed my body.
01:01:06.880I met Kyle Lemley through the Spiritual Ecology Fellowship and bringing in his work around
01:01:12.480sacred tree planting and the medicine of Pedro Reyes's work with guns to shovels and
01:01:20.240just liberating these rituals into space taking them out of museums migrating them like being
01:01:27.020like okay if someone has some medicine that we need to learn from let's keep practicing it let's
01:01:31.580keep bringing it I was working as a copy editor for Pedro's book and I read about Palas por
01:01:37.280pistolas and his other work where he transforms weapons into instruments i was like we need to do
01:01:43.180this everywhere let's plant things let's plant food let's reimagine what security is let's
01:01:49.780decompose violence let's do that work together and so this work of alchemy feels like the medicine
01:01:55.300that is really needed right now and i'm excited to gather in atlanta and we'll be gathering on
01:02:02.280the night that Dr. King was killed 50 years ago. And it feels auspicious. It feels like that moment
01:02:08.100of where the quantum shifts can happen, where that energy is open. And I feel him and his life
01:02:16.340and legacy walking with us. Wow, Bronte, I am so grateful for you and this work and the depth of
01:02:26.060your care and healing and intention and love. It is absolutely mind-blowing. And I have one last
01:02:38.980bonus question for you because I am mesmerized by the way you communicate, by the way you express
01:02:48.700yourself, watching you with groups of people in this interview, I'm always just so taken by how
01:02:57.480you can connect linguistically. And I feel like another reason we can get stuck in the movement
01:03:12.000or through healing is that the English language restricts our expansiveness because it's so
01:03:20.820utilitarian and reductionist and narrow and can lack spirit and animacy. And now as we journey
01:03:29.460further into the Anthropocene, we're facing unprecedented experiences that the English
01:03:35.640language doesn't have the wherewithal to describe. I know language is deeply important to you. And
01:03:44.120I'm so curious if there's anything you'd like to share about your journey and decolonizing the way
01:03:50.720you communicate. Yes, my favorite thing. I was with my friend, Harry, I mentioned in New York
01:04:02.420this past August and I wanted to get a tattoo with alchemy alchemical symbol tattooed on my
01:04:10.420at the base of my throat and was really thinking about like am I speaking from my mind or like
01:04:19.200is this sound coming from my heart and language is really important to me because my parents
01:04:27.100name me this name that means thunder and I think a lot about sound I've had a fight with English
01:04:32.940as a poet and growing up as a poet and being like I as and as a black Latinx woman person
01:04:40.280to be like okay I'm not supposed to be speaking this language and all the ways I relate to
01:04:48.820myself, my love, my being in the world are informed by the psychology of this language.
01:04:57.880And I love English. One of its gifts is its flexibility. We can make it whatever it wants
01:05:04.840to be. Literally, you can make up any words you want. That's why I love the Bureau of
01:05:08.980Linguistical Reality. And I love this idea of making up new words to inform our experiences
01:05:17.360at this time. So one way for me is making new words and naming experiences. Right now, I am
01:05:25.580working on a word to name the experience of words that only are the antithesis of what we
01:05:38.540want to separate ourselves from. For example, like nonviolence or anti-oppression, but we don't have
01:05:45.020the word for what nonviolence is the only thing we know is it's not that so that's what we've
01:05:49.960called it and like what would be a word to name that constellation of words so that we could start
01:05:56.180to understand our relationship to them and naming is really critical it allows things to have a
01:06:03.480shape a shape in a way where we can see it from many sides and in addition to making up new words
01:06:09.480I'm also interested in rooting English is uprooted colonial language. We don't know where it comes
01:06:17.640from. So we're speaking things and we don't know what spells that we're casting. We don't know the
01:06:22.180history of what we're saying. We don't understand the monetization of the language. A lot of our
01:06:27.860language around time and love becomes about possession and it's monetized. And like, I just
01:06:36.460listen a lot to how we're saying things and how I'm saying things and what I'm invoking when I
01:06:40.840let something come out of my body how that sound affects people and to really trust that it does
01:06:46.840to really really really know that it really does and to be careful to be careful because what we
01:06:52.200start to say becomes true when we start to change our language it changes us and that's what I'm
01:06:58.060really excited about when I root the language when I start to root it and bring it back to the ground
01:07:02.540it, has another experience. I love English now because I'm able to go and be like, I wonder what
01:07:09.160the etymology of this word is because I am diagnosing this sensation through a language
01:07:14.960that is colonial. And so I am actually closing off the experience of this sensation to be
01:07:22.500something else because I've already decided what it is because I've been told that this sensation
01:07:28.240means this I've been told that this sensation is jealousy this sensation is sadness this sensation
01:07:34.540is anxiety and when I learned that the etymology of anxiety is narrow or when I learned that the
01:07:40.440etymology of jealous is zealous I go wait what was the point when those things got separated and how
01:07:46.200did they and what do I need to do to just be with these feelings and to be more in an embodied
01:07:52.360to experience and to embody and root English a little more. And it feels very important to me
01:07:59.480that we are changing how we speak to one another. It feels very important to me that we're asking
01:08:03.320what language are we praying in? And I saw in this Land Justice anthology that just came out
01:08:08.320and the etymology of anthology, antho, it comes from anthos, which means flowers.
01:08:14.060There's a quote in there about you can really know someone by the language that they cry in.
01:08:19.300I was like, wow, okay. Yeah, what language do I cry in? And also moving away from language and
01:08:26.680finding more ways to be embodied. I think that's really critical for this time too. And I'm really
01:08:31.220moved by Kevin Quashie's work around the sovereignty of quiet. That's also coming to me
01:08:37.560a lot as medicine to not say anything and to find quiet and to be moved by quiet or to be still by
01:08:46.580quiet wow ronda you have been such a teacher to me in every conversation we have i love the way
01:08:57.820your mind and heart function the depth of your curiosity and all of the roads that you walk down
01:09:09.860and bushwhack through it's such a gift to spend time with you and wonder aloud together