00:00:00.000To listen to the extended version of this episode, support us on patreon.com slash for the wild.
00:00:08.240Hello and welcome to for the wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today I'm speaking with Morgan
00:00:14.860Curtis. That's not about casting out my ancestors or punishing them for sin. It's about recognizing
00:00:25.500that we can only really heal when we've put right that which we've done wrong.0.79
00:00:33.720Guided by the call to transmute the legacy of her colonizing and enslaving ancestors,
00:00:39.920Morgan is dedicated to working with her fellow people with wealth and class privilege towards
00:00:44.380redistribution, atonement, and repair. As a facilitator, money coach, organizer, and ritualist,
00:00:50.900She works to catalyze the healing of relationship with self, family, ancestors, community, and the0.82
00:00:57.500land, enabling the surrender of power and control so that resources can flow towards racial,
00:01:03.940environmental, and economic justice. She is in the process of redistributing 100% of her inherited
00:01:10.280wealth and 50% of her income to primarily Black and Indigenous-led organizing and land projects.
00:01:17.020Morgan is a resident of Canticle Farm, a multiracial, interfaith, cross-class, intergenerational, intentional community in Lishan, Ohlone Territory, Oakland, California.
00:01:27.780She is currently a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School, where she is studying the spiritual dimension of the reparations work required by white people.
00:01:36.560well Morgan welcome this is such a sweet moment to share with you being deep friends and gosh
00:01:52.100comrades for so many years I'm really looking forward to sharing this conversation with others
00:01:58.880and your work and my admiration for you. It's mutual. Thank you so much, Ayanna. It's good
00:02:07.840to connect and be here and get to weave together. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Gosh, there's so much to say
00:02:17.900and to ask and to dive into, but I think I want to start with discussing the spiritual imperative
00:02:28.260of the work that you're doing and I'm wanting to ask how did you come to your work and
00:02:35.820what guiding voices are you listening to as you continue on this journey
00:02:40.820thank you how did I come to this work how did this work come to me I was a young person who had
00:02:55.400my heart broken open by the world. I think I was like 10 years old going around hiding the light
00:03:04.360bulbs in my parents' home, being like so upset about climate change and what was happening to
00:03:10.940our earth. And I grew up from there. And when I was a college student, I was part of starting a
00:03:23.380fossil fuel divestment campaign and it was in that campaign that I got educated by my peers
00:03:32.780fellow students mostly those of color around the deeper roots of the climate crisis what I had been
00:03:41.300able to feel in my body since I was a young person I began to understand as rooted in white supremacy
00:03:50.380in colonization, in legacies that were perpetrated by my own ancestors.
00:03:59.280I was raised in a family that had portraits of our ancestors hanging on the wall and family
00:04:08.480silver under the stairs taken out on special occasions and stories of our early American
00:04:20.380And so when I began to get taught, like, it was clear to me, oh, when we're talking about
00:04:29.880colonialism, that's my family. That's my ancestors who made those choices. When we're talking about
00:04:38.120capitalism, I have two investment bankers for grandfathers. That's my family too.
00:04:45.800and so i would say the voices i was listening to was firstly and primarily the earth and the call
00:04:57.100for radical change and then the voices of initially friends peers fellow students of color and
00:05:06.460as time went on mentors and elders particularly black and indigenous folks who stuck with me
00:05:14.500long enough to educate me and open my eyes to my entangled history with our current moment
00:05:24.140thanks for opening up the conversation that way and being transparent about your personal story
00:05:34.880which I know can be challenging but I really appreciate the work that you do to demystify
00:05:42.100yourself to others. I think there's a lot of power and beauty and healing in that. And I want to
00:05:48.960kind of get into more of this generational trauma and even talk about sin a bit. And
00:05:57.840in Weather Reports, the climate of relationships and intersectionality with Terry Tempest Williams
00:06:03.580and Bronte Velez, two of our favorite guests so far, you talk a lot about the idea of atonement
00:06:12.000alongside a deep contemplation of the founding sins of this country.
00:06:17.920And I'm wondering, how does the framework of sin and atonement structure the way you
00:06:22.980grapple with such intense questions, especially across generations?
00:06:29.080When I hear the word sin, the first voice that comes to mind is always my father.
00:06:34.420He would say, Morgan, stop searching for sin in our family tree.
00:06:39.420and I can see how he reacted that way to some of my first searching and uncovering and
00:06:49.680looking for this history in my family and I think that I wasn't so much searching for sin
00:07:00.280as like desperately trying to understand how to locate myself in history in our present crises
00:07:14.000and as I looked for those ancestors what I understood was yes my complicity yes my
00:07:27.620responsibility for repair. I could see the mistakes that they made. I could see
00:07:35.400the places where ancestors made choices where I could wish they made any other choice than the
00:07:45.380one they did. And it was tempting for a while to want to push them away, to want to
00:07:55.060pretend that they weren't my people and those weren't my stories to do the sort of vanishing0.68
00:08:03.800that I think whiteness can do in the United States of I can just disappear into a generic story and0.61
00:08:13.240not take a particular responsibility and how I've come to see it is the work that I'm doing towards0.77
00:08:24.540reparations towards atonement towards the redistribution of land money power from
00:08:35.060white folks who have violently hoarded it and back towards the communities it was stolen from
00:08:42.460is that that's not about casting out my ancestors or punishing them for sin it's about
00:08:51.600recognizing that we can only really heal when we've put right that which we've done wrong
00:09:00.660it's about bringing what could be understood as a framework of intergenerational restorative
00:09:09.200justice what is it to pick up that which has not been finished in my ancestral story that has not
00:09:19.260yet earned back and taken responsibility for so I experienced myself as
00:09:29.520on their side in that work to not have our family's only legacy be one of violence inequality
00:09:40.900climate and justice I'm reminded of the episode with Bronte on the pleasurable surrender of white
00:09:52.840supremacy that I know you and I have talked about a bit and when I think about this healing that
00:10:01.720you're doing for your lineage there it is healing and there's joy and there's release and surrender
00:10:09.620And like, it's almost like releasing the bricks off the shoulders of these ancestors, at least how I'm feeling it as you speak, that the healing touches everyone in the past, in the future.
00:10:24.460it's there's something to it that feels really I mean especially hearing it through you that does
00:10:31.300feel uplifting and joyful it's not some loss to let go or give away wealth power money
00:10:40.380story it's not I mean it's not that there's not grief but it's not a net loss which I think
00:10:47.560this culture really tries to tell us that if we give too much away we have nothing left for
00:10:54.940ourselves and of course we could dissect that in a lot of different ways but I feel like through
00:11:00.800you I'm hearing like like a pleasurable surrender of it and yeah yeah for that and thank you Bronte
00:11:14.260for that framing and yeah the the greatest grief of my life has been letting in actually letting
00:11:25.880my heart break when I see what my ancestors did which includes enslaving other human beings of
00:11:34.520both African and Native descent which includes participating in genocidal wars which includes0.63
00:11:43.480yeah the taking and theft of land and life0.98
00:11:49.240and as I do this work of turning towards that history and getting to be part of
00:11:59.860in some small way the first steps of healing and repair of those legacies that has been the
00:12:11.500greatest joy of my life and yeah the moments where I get to witness small parts of possibility that
00:12:21.600we can stand for something else other than violence in my family and my people
00:12:30.100and that people who have had their dreams denied and stolen and begin to dream again
00:12:37.580like oh there's nothing more i could want from this lifetime than to be part of that
00:12:45.500current part of that moment so yeah it's the best i hear it gosh in your letter to your descendants
00:12:57.540that you title quote post pandemic and post revolution you write quote don't get me wrong
00:13:05.960there is love in our story, but a forgetfulness of what it is for. To commit oneself to place
00:13:13.020and people to remember our belonging in the family of things, end quote. And I'm thinking
00:13:18.600about this quote in terms of how does finding right relationship involve healing both generational
00:13:27.380ties and ties to place? Yeah, great question. I always say that for me, the foundation of my
00:13:39.780ability to do this work is living in community. I have the great and immense privilege to live in
00:13:48.380intentional community where I've been for the last, this is my eighth year now, and
00:13:54.680living a commitment to place and living a commitment to that place's people
00:14:03.040and what comes from commitment the the mirrors the reflection the accountability the feedback that
00:14:13.400both earth and people offer us when we stay long enough in committed relationship
00:14:20.140I couldn't do this without that and I know it will take generations for my lineage to know
00:14:34.440what it means to be in right relationship with place again after having left our ancestral
00:14:43.940homelands and stolen those of others and practiced extraction and private property upon them ever
00:14:53.500since i know it's going to take a long time to undo those things in my body and the bodies of
00:15:01.260my descendants and i hope that i'm beginning that process
00:15:08.420yeah I guess I'm also thinking about the roles of shame and guilt and there's another quote that I
00:15:20.760wanted to read from you in your ancestors and money resource library and you write quote I
00:15:28.220support people to work through their fears doubts worries stuck places loneliness guilt and shame
00:15:34.280disrupting patterns of avoidance accumulation hiding and concealing and work to create a space
00:15:40.680where they can take transformative action beyond what they previously thought possible
00:15:45.840end quote and i know personally guilt and shame were gosh like leading actors in my life for a
00:15:56.780long time and they guided me to in a lot of ways do the work that I do and there was beauty there
00:16:04.680and I'm in a sense grateful that I felt anything honestly because so much of the dominant culture
00:16:12.520is the desensitization of our feelings both ups and downs and we're kind of our feelings are in
00:16:22.240a sense controlled by advertisements and media and schooling and so on and so forth and unhealthy
00:16:30.100family structures. And so I'm grateful to the shame and guilt. And then there was also a time
00:16:36.100where I realized that these leading actors needed to take a step back and there needed to be new
00:16:43.860guiding forces in my life. And so what roles are shame and guilt playing in this narrative? But
00:16:51.120also how do we work through shame and guilt without letting it continually consume us
00:16:56.320place that i start from with this is that guilt and shame are natural empathic
00:17:06.060human responses to benefiting from injustice as you said like oh to feel something to feel
00:17:17.140something in a world that is painfully wrong and to be on the side of that wrongness in such a way
00:17:27.460that's giving us perhaps material comfort perhaps some semblance of safety for however long
00:17:36.180but ultimately is hurting others along the way if we're not feeling something about that
00:17:45.340that's the first step is to figure out to listen for to notice where our heart is able to open
00:17:56.920and to lean into that and to let it shake us and it's also not the destination i think shame and
00:18:07.560guilt points us somewhere it takes us somewhere like you said it can bring us to work that's
00:18:16.420ours to do it can bring us to responsibilities that are ours to take but it won't sustain them
00:18:24.840it doesn't have an energy that carries us through the challenges we inevitably face
00:18:33.140when we make different choices than the ones that dominant culture or our families are wanting us
00:18:40.160to make and so i think what more deeply sustains us is that which we are called to that which we
00:18:49.000are longing for and it's from that place of looking out of yeah to the horizon of what do
00:18:58.400I really want for this one wild and precious life as Mary Oliver says what what do I want for
00:19:06.980my people for all people for this earth and how can I let that longing move through me
00:19:16.220I mean give thanks to my friend Justine Epstein and her essay on longing for
00:19:22.420guiding a lot of my thinking on this yeah I want to talk about giving thanks more and I also
00:19:32.880kind of want to balance that or not balance isn't the right word but maybe what keeps us from
00:19:40.080the practice of gratitude which to me can be this never-ending search for security because
00:19:48.100the scarcity mindset that capitalism offers us really encourages anxiety. And I think it also
00:19:58.980encourages hoarding and lack of mutual aid community. It completely shifts our value system
00:20:08.900of what we do value and and that's also what we value as security and so I wonder with this
00:20:18.040scarcity mindset for the never-ending search for security and then on the other side you know maybe
00:20:26.720the antidote is cultivating a practice of gratitude not the only antidote but I I've read
00:20:33.620that a lot in your work, just, um, being grateful and not being grateful for what we're told, um,
00:20:43.260where we're told gratitude should come from either, because I think there's, you know, I don't know,
00:20:48.920I just had this, this thought about the prosperity gospel popping into my head. Um, and it's a really
00:20:56.420shallow way to be thankful if it's just about wealth accumulation, obviously, or buying
00:21:03.580things or being able to have whatever you want whenever you want it and so um yeah i'm wondering
00:21:10.540if you can kind of tussle with that um the the never writing search for security and the practice
00:21:18.780of gratitude yeah i love that you're bringing this in so along my own journey of figuring out
00:21:30.460how to redistribute my inherited wealth in the spirit of repair towards healing I was
00:21:39.740increasingly finding people who were like coming up to me in the hallway and social movement spaces
00:21:47.120and saying like me me too like I I secretly have this money and I feel alone in it and so
00:21:56.580about five years ago i started offering one-on-one support to people in a more
00:22:03.220structured way and i remember it was my my first session with my first client collaborator and
00:22:12.480i was nervous and i got on and the first thing i said was well we're gonna begin with gratitude
00:22:19.980because gratitude is the most accessible antidote to capitalism that we have and
00:22:27.500i repeated i've repeated that practice on every call i've ever had with anyone ever since
00:22:34.220and i believe it really deeply that just to sit with the miracle that it is to breathe to
00:22:43.560drink water to see the sun come up each day to sit with like
00:22:49.660that I get to be alive today when so many others don't that I get to be in whatever wellness I
00:22:58.260have today when so many others don't what a privilege gratitude as an antidote and as a
00:23:08.020foundation and about safety, about security, about scarcity. I think it's totally reasonable
00:23:21.380for any of us having been raised in a dominant capitalist culture to think that safety comes
00:23:29.200for money because in some ways it does in some ways it can help us have a roof over our heads
00:23:38.160food to eat it can have those material consequences for so many and we are on a planet that is
00:23:49.540shifting rapidly we are in societies that are not yet able to govern themselves amidst
00:24:00.620intense and painful legacies of oppression and ultimately there is no separate safety
00:24:10.060and even if there is it looks like being behind a spiky metal fence far from anyone else with
00:24:21.760hoarded food in a basement with a private rocket ship ready to leave with armored cars ready to
00:24:29.520take us to our hideout like the the final expression of what it is to rely on money
00:24:36.640as our source of safety is a terrifying one and if that's not where we want to go how do we practice
00:24:44.740other forms of safety here and now how do we practice relying on one another how do we practice
00:24:53.820being reliable i think for a lot of people with wealth we grew up we were accustomed to
00:25:03.000using the capitalist marketplace to meet our needs through the commodification of most forms
00:25:11.340of labor to support our lives so what is it to remember how to support one another out of love
00:25:19.160how to show up for one another in a spirit of gift in a spirit of reciprocity and it can look
00:25:27.080so simple like i'm going to pick someone up from the airport so they don't have to call an uber
00:25:32.960or I'm going to pick up their groceries for them
00:26:25.980in a stale fog of purple and gold the ground breaks streets start to crumble we stumble
00:26:41.740as we make our way home i would love to think about how to move beyond language
00:26:55.720with reparations because I think that, yeah, it's interesting just thinking about how social
00:27:05.960change happens and how we move through these epiphanies or changes in our understanding of
00:27:16.380the world. And there's a way in which we can, like for instance, land back or reparations,
00:27:25.240these big words that encompass so much. It's like, wow, okay, yeah, that sounds like a good
00:27:29.680idea, but how? You know, how do people take concrete actions when practicing reparations?
00:27:39.980And I know you've been practiced and studying this, and I think it's really helpful for us to
00:27:47.280hear what it can look like and um and also just to say uh to your last response to thinking about
00:27:55.980driving away in our armored cars or whatever that people use to their bunkers and whatnot
00:28:03.560i have some friends who are really apocalyptic and and i i really was at a point too and then
00:28:13.120there just something shifted in me where I thought is that how I want to survive like do I want to
00:28:21.660survive with so much fear knowing that all that I love both plant animal human kin are out there
00:28:30.640somewhere separate from me suffering I know we have a human instinct to survive we're animals
00:28:40.180And I can understand that. But at what cost? I don't know. They're just there. I really had to have a reckoning with myself and my apocalyptic story of my journey of how to, you know, for me, stand where I love and fight like hell, you know, stop running, whether that's running from like the metaphor or the psychological pain or running from actual disasters, like natural disasters or things like that.
00:29:08.300there's I think I think that's also where the spiritual reckoning comes into play where this
00:29:15.440is really more of a spiritual question than it is just tangible physical logistical yeah I guess
00:29:21.060you know again like thinking about the logistical question is like logistically how how do we
00:29:27.980practice reparations how do we practice mutual aid how do we practice this world outside of
00:29:35.380um selfishness big beautiful question let me all speak to a little bit of the material first
00:29:48.080and then the spiritual knowing that they can't really be separated by
00:29:52.540yeah as long as people have been enslaved on this continent there have been calls for reparations
00:30:01.160and as long as there have been European colonists on this continent there have been calls for land
00:30:08.820return and we're in a moment an extended moment a generational moment where I think some of us
00:30:20.400are starting to maybe learn how to listen to those calls a little bit and it is a big thing
00:30:31.580to think about how change happens and I think it's important when we're talking about reparations
00:30:39.700and land return this is what I've been invited to hold it as is those need to happen at a
00:30:46.860governmental institutional scale like the U.S. government and other governments need to
00:30:55.320make repair at a scale that only governments can't and how do we not wait for that to happen
00:31:04.200or how do we remember that governments follow the people and that it's only from movements
00:31:13.560rising up from the grassroots that change can happen at the governmental level and
00:31:20.380we see that movement rising up right now at small scales even when a national federal or
00:31:31.620international conversation can look so regressive we see towns and cities and institutions and
00:31:39.140individuals beginning to make acts of repair. And in my journey, what that has looked like is
00:31:47.460choosing to redistribute the $600,000 that I inherited towards Black and Indigenous-led
00:31:59.140land projects and social movements. Sometimes we talk about it in an organization. I'm part of
00:32:06.600resource generation which organizes young people with wealth wealth and class privilege towards
00:32:12.600the redistribution of money land and power we talk about it as how do we voluntarily redistribute
00:32:20.580resources to fund the movement for involuntary redistribution at the scale of reparations and
00:32:29.440land return and i've learned so much through that process of moving those resources and one thing
00:32:41.180i'll speak to is it's been clear to me all along that i need to practice redistributing power
00:32:49.680wherever possible over where those resources end up because the ways that i've been acculturated
00:32:57.840and raised up as a white person through elite education has me really not able to see what is
00:33:06.100most needed right now and so some of the resources i've moved have been through things like
00:33:13.580liberated capital or the movement for black lives or a haymarket people's fund entities where
00:33:22.280movement leaders are making decisions about where resources need to move in their own communities
00:33:28.320and at the same time if that's the only way i move resources i'm letting myself off the hook of
00:33:39.240the hard intimate beautiful work of having relationship across lines of race and class
00:33:48.820where resources are actually moving and so it has really also been part of my work to move
00:33:55.100resources to black and indigenous mostly friends and their projects and their dreams for the world
00:34:04.640so that's a little of how i'm seeing things happen in my own story and others similarly as well
00:34:12.920and the spiritual piece there's there's no way to move resources that one has been taught
00:34:24.760are for one's own safety and security out to the world in the spirit of repair
00:34:32.240without asking some of the deepest questions about what does it mean to be alive what does
00:34:41.660it mean to be human? How am I going to do this thing called life? How am I going to dare to do
00:34:50.280it differently than I was told I should? And those are spiritual questions. They're questions that
00:34:59.680we can only live the answers. We can't just find them. And it also brings up, as I was speaking
00:35:08.420to earlier, yeah, what is my relationship with my ancestors? How do I feel them? How do I feel
00:35:17.360how they feel about what's happening now? And what is my relationship with land as a settler
00:35:26.440on land that is still occupied by me and others? What does it mean to listen for right relationship
00:35:34.260with the more than human beings where I am and to understand that that process of my own
00:35:41.400transformation of how I'm living to shift as much as I can out of the extractive norms of our world
00:35:50.320that's a spiritual practice yeah I think the spiritual psychological elements are so
00:35:59.720necessary, like they are the foundation for this work. And I think about just the way we're taught
00:36:08.560to feel like we are owed something or what's the word that I've heard? Not that I watch Fox News
00:36:17.680regularly or anything, but I feel like I could, when I've seen it, there's this, like this,
00:36:25.880you know I'm owed this or I deserve this or I worked really hard for this or my grandparents
00:36:33.400worked really hard for this and you know they what's the thing like the bootstraps there's
00:36:39.460like that saying of like lift yourself yeah pull thank you pull yourself I clearly don't use that
00:36:44.880one a lot um pull yourself up from your bootstraps and so I think um and of course to me that also
00:36:51.940ties into manifest destiny and just the whole way that the United States was formed, especially
00:36:59.620through the white settler vision of like, if you work hard, then you deserve this inheritance and
00:37:06.920you deserve the wealth accumulation. But there's no talk about the enslaved people who made that
00:37:13.760actually happen or the externalities on the earth like no money is created freely like it's being
00:37:23.300taken from somewhere from someone from people from land from water from um and so even the people who
00:37:31.280quote are self-made quote the self-made men like even that statement it's like nobody is self-made
00:37:38.940the if even if you had not one human working for you the earth you are taking everything from the
00:37:46.220earth to create your self-madeness and so um yeah I so I think this unlearning of what we are owed
00:37:54.160or what we are what we deserve and then the question is of like what is our real inheritance
00:38:02.400then and if we can let go of the idea of what we're owed um or what we are born into
00:42:20.720i want to go back to resource generation which you had mentioned before and i want to read their
00:42:30.700transformative investment principles says quote our financial system is intentionally complicated
00:42:37.620and abstract in order to one systemically deny access to women people of color poor and working
00:42:43.900class communities lgbtq folks and other marginalized groups and to hide the dehumanizing harmful
00:42:50.540and inequitable nature of investments, end quote. And yeah, I just think it would be interesting.
00:42:58.340I'm imagining a lot of folks have never heard of resource generation or the work that they're doing
00:43:04.640or the work that a lot of folks are doing to bring light to this type of these complicated
00:43:15.140financial systems. And yeah, I'm wondering, so much of the physical structure of our world is
00:43:26.360shaped by concepts of debt or wealth accrual and inheritance. And I'm wondering, how does talking
00:43:34.560about and demystifying wealth serve to make obvious the ways exploitation has become common
00:43:41.420courtesy and then how do we strip away the capitalist alienation that makes
00:43:47.420complacency within these systems so easy yeah I'm really really grateful for
00:43:56.420resource generation and the generations of people thinking about these questions before me that made
00:44:03.380that space possible yeah rg is a space where i think sooner and or later if you're a young person
00:44:13.160under 36 with wealth whether earned or inherited some and with progressive social justice or
00:44:22.460radical values someone's going to be like have you heard of rg and that was definitely what
00:44:28.740happened to me and it gets to be a space where people can talk about things that they've never
00:44:36.760had the space to talk about before which is emotional and it's processing the feelings and
00:44:46.920family stories and the journey of what it's been like to as we spoke to earlier be the beneficiary
00:44:56.200of an unjust system and it's a space for political education it's a space for learning about the
00:45:06.280history of racial capitalism and beginning to become a better yeah advocate for bringing that
00:45:16.260analysis to our families and other wealthy communities and it's a space for financial
00:45:23.820education I think really often folks who have some financial wealth especially those that
00:45:31.280inherited it who have social justice values there can be a like I'm just not gonna look at this
00:45:37.940like I'm gonna pretend this isn't there or I'm gonna just avoid having to face this because
00:45:47.660yeah so often especially women and queer folks are not being given even conventional financial
00:45:55.780education let alone radical or reinterpreted financial education and so yeah RG did a lot
00:46:03.320of work over the last few years to develop those transformative investment principles
00:46:07.660that are really inviting people to reckon with where where does the money you have sleep at night
00:46:15.720where what is it up to when it's not yours when it's at the bank when it's in the investment
00:46:22.300portfolio and yeah what we see is 99 of the time money that's out there supposedly in our name is
00:46:34.860up to something it's up to being used by multinational corporations it's up to
00:46:44.240yeah providing like investment and resource to maximize shareholder profits and further
00:46:54.880the concentration of wealth and what we're seeing right now is alternatives emerging and
00:47:03.880i would point towards just one example of seed commons which is a national network of
00:47:11.160non-extractive loan funds governed at the community level, resourcing worker-owned
00:47:19.060cooperatives where profits belong to the workers that produce them. And it's possible to put one's
00:47:28.900resources into that pool instead of into the S&P 500. And I feel lucky to be in this work
00:47:40.860at this time where such alternatives are emerging. That's really good to hear about. And
00:47:49.640And I do wonder where, if you know, which I'm assuming you have some ideas, like, if folks want to find out more resources of where they can invest or learn where the money goes, like, and who maybe won't be members of Resource Generation, do you have any ideas of where people can follow these threads?
00:48:19.640Yeah, one, you mentioned my resource library earlier, I have a ton of links in there that point towards a lot of different alternative impact, regenerative, solidarity, economy, investments.
00:48:34.640This world goes by a lot of names, as well as to financial advisors and financial planners who are able to support people to take their money away from Wall Street and reinvest it in community.
00:48:49.820One I would point towards is revalue investing out of Michigan can support folks to make a financial plan and put their money 100% in community enterprises that further solidarity and economic self-determination for communities of color instead of wealth extraction and hoarding and accumulation for a white elite.
00:49:19.820And, yeah, there's also the next egg, which is a community of people thinking about how to do that with retirement money, which is where the majority of Americans that do have investments have those investments in retirement accounts.
00:49:38.060So that's a big question that's being worked on is, yeah, how do we reinterpret what it means to make a long-term investment? Perhaps a long-term investment that furthers climate change or increases wealth inequality is not actually the best thing for our retirement. So grateful for all those folks doing that good work.
00:50:01.560Yeah. Thanks for the resource library. I'm sure there's a lot there to get into. And, you know, earlier you had mentioned, and of course I know this about you, all of your work with climate justice.
00:50:18.540And I'm interested to see or to hear what your thoughts about climate change are at this point, you know, as you've spent a number of years in the movement and how your work has grown and expanded and shifted and where you feel like the most effective future for climate organizing.
00:50:45.440yeah what direction that is going in could go in yeah I don't want to say should go in because I
00:50:53.440don't know if any of us know that but yeah yeah sometimes people will ask me like oh how come you
00:51:00.180don't do that climate stuff anymore and I still see my work as part of a climate movement broadly
00:51:10.000defined i yeah it was really what i was asked to do by my peers and elders in the climate
00:51:19.320justice space was like please go do the work with your own people and it's yeah how do we
00:51:26.880those of us who are stewarding unequal amounts of financial resources how do we actually invest
00:51:35.800those in a just transition away from an extractive economy and towards a regenerative life-sustaining
00:51:44.780economy that's a framework for movement generation and we need to do it faster than we can possibly
00:51:54.180imagine and we need to do it in a way that attends to the histories that brought us into
00:52:03.460climate catastrophe and if we move forward into building a new economy that continues to
00:52:13.380accumulate wealth and power for a small elite we will not get to a place of stability in
00:52:22.200our human family and on this planet and
00:52:25.300so there's urgency in many cases to slow down and to listen to one another and
00:52:35.440to heal from these histories and from these legacies through repair and
00:52:43.460I feel like what I've really learned is like the futures that indigenous people dream of
00:52:51.880the futures that black folks dream of those are the futures we all need at this time and so as we
00:53:01.640get out of the way as we move our resources our prayers our energy towards the leadership of those
00:53:13.160that our ancestors harmed we can move into a place where maybe one day all of our descendants
00:53:22.200can share this planet in a better way well i'm wondering as we come to a close i just want to
00:53:32.740pull a bit more on those dreams or the visions of what abundance could look like in the future and
00:53:41.960how it could center healing and equity I just like to kind of visualize it all together
00:53:48.240two things that are coming first to mind is land right relationship with land
00:53:57.820indigenous sovereignty and stewardship of land uh yeah the world's biodiversity is
00:54:06.300most concentrated on indigenous lands what does that tell us about the possibility for
00:54:13.260ecological regeneration if more and more land can be returned to indigenous hands
00:54:19.320and i think about the legacy of black cooperative development of the ancestral practices of
00:54:31.620sharing and of building power in community rather than in hierarchy and what it is to
00:54:42.640move towards a world in which resources and responsibilities and returns and rewards are
00:54:52.260shared amongst all people those who worked for them as well as those who are not able to work
00:54:58.740and where children and elders are cared for and valued
00:55:05.740as intimate parts of a village of people.
00:55:13.200So, yeah, village might be a word that I feel like I've been taught
00:55:19.680and learning to lean into as what we need to remember