For The Wild - TIFFANY LETHABO KING on The Black Shoals [with brontë velez], Part Two ⧸316

00:00:00.000 Hello, my name is Bronte Velez, and I am so humbled to introduce this special episode

00:00:09.740 on For the Wild. In this conversation, I join as a guest host to interview the brilliant and

00:00:17.400 phenomenal and heart-centered and generous and right on time, Tiffany Lothabo King.

00:00:24.860 the land remembers you right the land is making space for you it remembers you

00:00:31.480 it's calling and pulling you towards it tiffany lethabo king she they is a descendant

00:00:38.680 of african people enslaved in the u.s south she grew up in lenape hokin and currently works

00:00:45.320 resides on monacan lands king is an associate professor of women gender and sexuality studies

00:00:51.580 at the University of Virginia. She is also a co-director of the Black and Indigenous Feminist

00:00:58.120 Futures Institute, funded by the Mellon Foundation. Tiffany is the author of The Black Shoals,

00:01:04.440 Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, published by Duke University Press in 2019.

00:01:11.360 If you ain't got your copy, pick it up for you, a loved one, one of those free book libraries

00:01:18.780 in your neighborhood, get your copy. As a scholar and teacher, she is committed to thinking about

00:01:27.020 how centuries-long relationships between Black and Indigenous peoples have provided openings

00:01:32.920 to alternative past, present, and futures. Black and Indigenous liberation struggles

00:01:38.540 informed by feminists and queer politics, as well as artistic production and quotidian acts

00:01:44.760 of survival and experimentation inspires her forthcoming scholarly and community-building

00:01:50.720 work. I loved this conversation with Tiffany, and I am so grateful for what emerged in our

00:01:58.220 time together. Our conversation traverses sacred laughter, Black and Indigenous feminisms,

00:02:03.860 sexuality, liberation, ceremony, and protocol. It was recorded in January of 2021. Elements

00:02:12.200 of our conversations score a project called can i get a witness a collaboration between for the

00:02:18.440 wild and led to life can i get a witness is a transmedia project that traces two queer black

00:02:24.840 latinx fems myself and steph hewitt dancing before and being danced by the ecology memory

00:02:32.040 and stories of the tongas national forest and glacier bay in southeast alaska unceded clinket

00:02:38.920 Haida Shimshian territories. Scored by field recordings and music by Jordi Rosales and Jose

00:02:45.520 Rivera. Interviews from For the Wild podcast with Tiffany King, what you're about to hear,

00:02:51.680 Wanda Kashudaha and Kasaya Gay, matriarchal Tlingit elders and lifelong forest defenders

00:02:57.100 of the Tongass and Glacier Bay, interviewed by Ayanna Young, with footage from Molly Lebov

00:03:03.280 and Jade Begay. The film and constellated media utilizes dance as a grammar to hold the complexity

00:03:10.160 of its narrative, tracing connections between melting ice in Alaska and the disappearing

00:03:16.240 Caribbean, the separation of Black and Indigenous relations, and the critical suture that Black and

00:03:22.680 Indigenous femme survival requires the earth's health. Quote, dance as a grammar, unquote,

00:03:29.560 and quote, the land's refusal to be separated from flesh, unquote, are beautiful offerings

00:03:37.040 and signifiers you'll hear from Tiffany King in this interview. I want to extend my deepest

00:03:44.180 gratitude to the brilliant and dear Jasmin Cadarontores, who is my research and thought

00:03:51.800 partner, my chismetics, my spiritual companion for this interview. I appreciate you so much.

00:03:58.880 Thank you, Hasmi, for your study, heart, wisdom, and prayer, all that you contributed for this

00:04:04.420 interview to be possible. To the listeners, I hope this conversation between Tiffany and I

00:04:09.940 opens imagination and healing for you. I hope it brings you joy. I encourage you to also

00:04:16.020 encounter the filmic aspects of this conversation through Can I Get a Witness? Enjoy.

00:04:21.900 i love that i love that thank you for that affirmation and the way it relaxes my nervous

00:04:32.780 system and yeah it tells me affirms and confirms that that i'm on a on the right path and what you

00:04:42.900 shared about moving toward black livingness as opposed to an archive or you know an excavation

00:04:53.560 around black death made me think of someone I was trained under Professor Greg Childs at

00:04:59.760 who was at Brandeis University who talked about I remember the first time I heard him speak he

00:05:06.360 talked about a project he was working on looking at an enslave rebellion in Brazil in the 18th

00:05:16.780 century and he's talking about how he was going through the archive in an attempt to

00:05:26.640 kind of locate how this main instigator of the rebellion went about their sedition

00:05:36.460 and he found himself in his excavation actually taking on the life and posture of slave catcher

00:05:46.680 and he was saying you know this finding this will be really perhaps good for my book or for

00:05:53.960 the academy or the conferences I go to to have this writing or text that no one has ever had

00:06:00.940 but actually for those people at that moment those black folks in Brazil to not be found 0.70

00:06:07.260 allows them to still be free and to be fugitive and what what am I really trying to find and I

00:06:15.300 loved that re-approach to protecting, protecting fugitivity, protecting

00:06:22.680 Marinage, and how to, what Juliet Singh talks about, this idea that no archive

00:06:31.260 will restore you. I really love this kind of like, how do we not, how do we be

00:06:37.220 careful with how we approach history, how we approach historiography. And

00:06:45.260 in that I want to kind of come back I want to come back to the shoal and what happened where

00:06:51.860 you began to use the shoal is what you call your your organizing metaphor and how did the shoal

00:06:59.160 it sounded like the shoal encountered you through kind of continuing to pass flat shoals which I

00:07:05.800 flat shoals row which I grew up right near um I'm curious how the shoal encountered you

00:07:12.200 to reimagine your scholarship

00:07:14.880 around Black and Native studies and relations?

00:07:18.380 And where were you before you encountered the show?

00:07:22.160 How were you approaching the work?

00:07:25.000 No, thank you for all of that.

00:07:27.220 We're gonna have to definitely come back

00:07:29.500 to what your professor was saying

00:07:32.500 about like taking on the persona

00:07:35.100 and embodiment of slave catchers.

00:07:37.160 That people are so close to having that happen

00:07:39.600 all the time in the academy.

00:07:40.960 you have to actively work against that so thank you for that reminder and in all forms of work

00:07:46.880 I'm sure but you know I um I often tell this story about the geography that you grew up around

00:07:54.480 and on right when I'm talking to folks about this organizing metaphor of the shore I I know that I

00:08:02.220 was looking for a space of encounter both between black and indigenous folks and the the metaphors

00:08:14.140 that academic fields often rely on like the black atlantic or the oceanic for diaspora and black

00:08:22.900 folks right and terra and land for indigenous folks and i'm like where do those those

00:08:30.860 metaphors and geographies meet up and touch each other and become something different and for a

00:08:39.300 while I was probably three years deep into like actually working on the manuscript and was dealing

00:08:46.060 with the shoreline right I had this I had all these files I was working on like an intro the

00:08:52.180 chapter one chapter two and I kept coming back to the intro and I was thinking and reworking and

00:08:59.220 always struggling with with the fact that the shore wasn't enough like it was just something

00:09:03.460 that the shore wasn't doing for me Bronte and it was like well I don't know is it that like the

00:09:08.780 shore is something that nations often claim right they they get incorporated into nation states and

00:09:15.640 become a part of territory very easily right if you look at any kind of like televisual or film

00:09:23.900 kind of recreation of a scene of conquest where the explorers and conquistadors are coming on

00:09:30.960 the shore they plant a flag there and I'm like I that's not what I'm that's not the place that's

00:09:36.580 not the place right and I was just struggling and searching and doing a lot of labor to figure out

00:09:44.860 something else and I couldn't write myself into it like literally w-r-i-t-e I could not write

00:09:51.380 myself into it and so I was you know on a very deep subconscious level in a place of searching

00:10:00.420 but just doing a very mundane thing of driving like a lot of my other mundane uh kinds of

00:10:07.400 activities of like unfortunately like being on my phone before bed or washing dishes other things

00:10:14.820 would come to me, right? When I wasn't so aggressively and actively trying to sort things

00:10:21.840 out analytically, just in the kind of act of driving and letting myself flow with the particular

00:10:30.320 kind of urban and even gentrified geography that now Flat Shoals is, things just started to like

00:10:37.640 move right there was a certain when I stopped being so muscular about the searching like all

00:10:45.640 of these things could then I could be aware of and be more open to so literally after years of

00:10:50.940 driving down flat shoals in this space of need and openness right moving through the landscape

00:10:58.220 I decided to pay attention right my body was just ready to pay attention in a deeper and more

00:11:06.520 meaningful way to how these geographical markers even some of them being settler markers right

00:11:13.720 that street sign did not emerge because of muskogian people naming this place right so

00:11:20.720 again the white kind of shifting of geographies and using those geographic metaphors i was like

00:11:26.680 what is a shoal right and like thought about this is what i need because a shoal not only is a place

00:11:35.120 where the ocean floor comes up to meet the surface of the water it moves right if it's if it's a sand

00:11:43.040 formation or a coral formation over time that shoal is not going to be in the same place

00:11:47.780 it's elusive also shoals are dangerous right before the 19th century where there was a way

00:11:55.180 to do like a cross section of the ocean and people had been able to map through sound where the ocean

00:12:00.020 floor rose up, ships would be wrecked. People would die, right? The entire cargo would be lost,

00:12:08.280 right? They're dangerous, right? They force these vessels where I imagine these white conquistadors

00:12:16.220 come settlers who are enslaving people. They have to be careful. Their lives are in jeopardy. So 0.79

00:12:22.160 I'm like, this shoal does so much. And I have to think of it. It's giving me something that the

00:12:28.100 sure is not right and so it also made me think about the different kinds of attentions we have

00:12:36.280 with our bodies right like what it means to be creating work and where we have to listen and

00:12:43.300 where we have to feel and that this is not just a fully cerebral kind of project um and that

00:12:50.820 cerebral kind of activity is a thing that the university privileges right and they even if

00:12:57.140 people are having truly white subjects are having experiences like these that rely on other kinds of

00:13:03.060 senses you're not supposed to talk about that because that's not real intellectual labor but

00:13:09.600 I was like no I have to actually acknowledge all the ways that the spirit conspired that the

00:13:15.920 landscape conspired that a landscape that has been dominated and reworked and gentrified right 0.63

00:13:24.100 through our fucked up notion of what the human and the human has to do to space and land

00:13:29.960 broke through that day right and gave me something else so and and the geography where you grew up 0.88

00:13:37.780 right was pulsing and speaking to me so yeah that's how that happened

00:13:44.540 Oh, that is potent. It makes me tingle all over thinking about, I think so much about a scholar,

00:13:55.420 a Lori Palmer, who I believe is out of UC Santa Cruz, whose text in the aura of a whole has really

00:14:03.320 impacted me. It's about sites of material extraction. And she's visiting all of these

00:14:09.840 different places that are out of view where they're extracting helium and aluminum and

00:14:17.560 processing all of these elements that are so essential to our material lives and she has this

00:14:26.260 part in her opening where she talks about imagining a gentle matter and how difficult

00:14:34.060 some of these um how difficult some of these elements are to actually process the millions

00:14:41.560 of dollars of manufacturing going into taking them out of the ground and can we imagine that

00:14:47.540 the matter has agency and refusal to be extracted and that they're making people do a lot of 0.67

00:14:54.620 fucking work to take them out of their resting place and i just imagine that what you just said

00:15:03.060 that feels like it's from another part of the body and spirit of the shoal even if displaced 0.99

00:15:11.440 and even if uh even if the geography has been paved over and cemented and gentrified and changed

00:15:22.400 and you no longer know what the earth there is like that even still they snuck their way into

00:15:27.060 the sign for you to see it the street sign it's just and even if disturbed by the colonial project

00:15:35.220 of the of you know the street sign they still found their way through which I think is really

00:15:42.540 really powerful of imagining the earth as in consort with the work that you're doing

00:15:50.260 And I keep thinking about how you use a geologic grammar, and I'm wondering about how, yeah, the earth changed your relationship to English, because I've noticed in the text you, you're letting the shoal literally straight up speak through you.

00:16:08.920 And yeah, I'm just wondering how that changed your relationship to English.

00:16:15.500 Ooh, that's a deep question.

00:16:17.560 And I think that I don't even know. Again, timing is key. The fact that I'm having this conversation with you after Monday is allowing so many things to come together for me.

00:16:32.320 because I just had a conversation

00:16:35.520 with folks from Dark Laboratory like Talgulf

00:16:40.460 and Electra Marinage,

00:16:43.180 Jessica Marie Johnson and Jomaira Figueroa,

00:16:46.600 who we were talking about depoloniality.

00:16:49.580 And we got to senses through Jomaira's work,

00:16:53.880 Decolonizing Diasporas.

00:16:56.340 There's a chapter in her book,

00:16:58.580 Distiero, where she's talking about 0.95

00:17:00.520 the violent process of ripping black and indigenous people from the land and how we reconnect to land

00:17:08.580 and soil and she talks about characters um in a novel and their consuming of grass right in eating 0.82

00:17:19.240 the earth and was talking about pica right and so in spanish right and the sierra in spanish as

00:17:27.060 things that cannot be translated and there is no true english translation that gets at the violence

00:17:33.700 or that kind of craving and appetite of pika for land right and so there is a way that you're right

00:17:43.500 the shoal is doing something that that always exceeds english but also exceeds what language 0.54

00:17:50.920 as far as like the written kind of orthographic putting letters on and markings on a page and even

00:17:57.560 what we think can be translated into human language like there's a way that

00:18:02.860 our ecologies transcend that mode of communication and jomyra made me think about the work of

00:18:11.880 lamanda stallings lh stallings who recently wrote a dirty south manifesto and lamanda

00:18:20.680 talks about um in a context of the u.s south and then she also talks about this craving of dirt

00:18:31.160 in particular so not necessarily soil something with nutrients but dirt matter that has been

00:18:37.160 displaced often because of violent modes of genocide and enslavement and displacement

00:18:42.240 but black people's desire for that whether it's in urban spaces on the continent in africa or in

00:18:50.000 the u.s south and certainly jomyra could pull us to the caribbean but this desire to

00:18:57.940 eat dirt she reframes it as actually the land's refusal to be separated from flesh that 0.95

00:19:09.700 sent me wow right like your actual bodily desire is a pulling from the earth because the earth

00:19:19.600 refuses to be separated from you so it would make you crave it right so talk about agency right and

00:19:26.800 that sense of the erotic and I had Bronte so as a part of like my scaffolding that everything that

00:19:33.920 could bring me to the show it brought me back to I think it was 2014 so this is before I even had a

00:19:42.800 book project I was like still thinking about I just wrote a dissertation I have nothing in me

00:19:47.700 there's no way I can write a book I'm probably gonna lose my job like I just whatever I just 0.61

00:19:53.960 wrote a whole ass dissertation like I don't know what y'all want from me right but it takes me back 0.97

00:19:59.320 to like how the land was working on me I went on this incredible hike with these two black folks 0.98

00:20:07.020 who one had left Russia the other was a brother who'd grown up in like Portland somewhere in the 1.00

00:20:13.620 Pacific Northwest they met on some interesting dating site that was like black people who fuck 0.99

00:20:20.160 with nature so literally this black one from Russia and this black U.S. uh born man come 1.00

00:20:29.860 together in Cachoeira in the mountains of Cachoeira in Bahia take me on this hike on a dry riverbed

00:20:38.220 wow real pretty though and I was freaked out Bronte I told this story on Monday I was like

00:20:45.820 you know I had gotten into this weird mode where I was kind of out of out of balance and not

00:20:51.600 dipping into like moving with joy so like I hadn't really like worked my heart and my lungs in the

00:20:56.600 way I needed to before going on this hike and they're like be ready so like make sure

00:21:00.280 you know your limber you're doing your movements didn't listen didn't shut up unprepared

00:21:05.920 I didn't do what they said and was freaking out because it was really it required a lot of

00:21:13.260 exertion like right before then we had like climbed for like 800 meters like literally using

00:21:19.400 my hands and my feet to climb and then we're on this riverbed so I was exhausted and it was kind

00:21:24.920 of still slick right um so there wasn't water coursing through it but it's still slick um moss

00:21:31.480 other kinds of life is there and I felt like I was going to twist an ankle or twist a knee and I was

00:21:39.580 freaking out and I had to calm myself down and when I was like the spirit of like breathe and

00:21:46.320 trust was there and when I was moving after I had calmed down and just kind of surrendered to the

00:21:53.360 energy of that riverbed without a lot of effort rarely any like there was always a place to put

00:22:00.340 my foot, like a small space that was perfectly made for like the tip of my foot, the ball of my

00:22:07.600 foot that put me on secure ground. So I could deeply relate to what LaManda was talking about

00:22:14.540 and what Jackie Alexander is talking about. The land remembers you, right? The land is making

00:22:20.540 space for you. It remembers you. It's calling and pulling you towards it. And so I think that

00:22:27.320 that 2014 experience also worked on my body in a way to prepare me to be in a place to be open to

00:22:35.640 the show right even a show that was invisibilized that you said manipulated english language and

00:22:42.060 appeared on a sign for me right there's all this other stuff that happened before i got to writing

00:22:49.280 this book, right?

00:23:19.280 Thank you.

00:23:49.280 Wow, wow, wow, wow. Bahia will do it.

00:24:06.480 Bahia will really do it. I feel that about that place very deeply.

00:24:12.760 and yeah tracing back a moment of just thinking of two years ago on my birthday I was leaving

00:24:24.120 um I had I felt like I was going through an initiation uh after a ceremony that led to life

00:24:34.040 held in Oakland unceded Ohlone territory where we had transformed guns with the crucible

00:24:41.980 into these molds that were stars that were the constellations above Oscar Grant the evening he

00:24:49.440 was murdered 10 years prior and there had just been a lot of calling of like okay I there I want

00:24:57.040 to be working at a different level and I started to speak without care or protection I started to

00:25:05.440 say I wanted I started to say that I wanted an initiation which I really wish I hadn't said in

00:25:14.420 that way or been more specific which I'm learning now when you you know invoke things you need to

00:25:19.240 be really specific and I went on our birthday to Salvador and I was feeling called to be there

00:25:30.620 because it's the day that they honor Yemaya and I wanted to feel this kind of initiatory moment with

00:25:40.180 with land with the orishas with my solo return and all to say I ended up getting on on our birthday

00:25:53.260 I got attacked and while in Brazil I got robbed and my offerings almost got taken

00:26:03.780 but my whole bag and I had these offerings to give to the ocean and I had already gotten in

00:26:08.600 the water and I just started asking yeah my yeah for things for my life and there was no presence

00:26:15.140 and this is not to say that you know if I would have prayed I wouldn't have been hurt

00:26:20.700 um it doesn't it's not that simple but there was this correction I felt um a spiritual correction

00:26:30.500 I felt after I was safe I was fine it did not I was able to look at this person where it really 0.94

00:26:36.760 felt spiritual and to look them in their eyes and be like you don't know who you're fucking with 0.96

00:26:40.560 you don't know who you're robbing right now you don't know what state I'm in and what impact this 0.99

00:26:46.100 is going to have and it also brought me into this moment of black American hood and black 0.93

00:26:51.700 this red this black man in Brazil taking from me and there was just so there was so much going on

00:27:00.020 on a spiritual level and I remember after shaking the sun is now rising it's our birthday and

00:27:07.840 the fireworks are going and the offerings are starting to be the offerings are beginning to

00:27:15.120 be taken out to the water and I end up now finding my friends again and we can barely understand each

00:27:23.240 other I was set up with them we're trying to speak between Spanish and Portuguese and they tell me to

00:27:30.320 just bring my hand to the water because my hand had been injured in this event and I remember

00:27:37.080 coming to the water shaking I was completely I was shaking and I felt that ocean there take me

00:27:46.860 in the way that I think my body wanted to I think my body actually not on some like I deserve the

00:27:54.620 hurt but that that that ocean and what I had come for was actually that I wanted to come with that

00:28:01.480 level of reverence for my body to be in that state of, of shaking of, of trance of the Holy

00:28:10.040 Ghost and of coming to, of coming to water with reverence. And I've never related to the earth

00:28:16.980 flippantly since I've never gone since. And it makes me, I've never gone back to the earth

00:28:25.080 without bringing my offerings and without giving thanks and without acknowledging where I am.

00:28:31.480 and trusting what it means that there are other powers at play, moving, and it makes me think

00:28:39.440 about some of your, when we're talking about the flesh and the earth and the earth actually 0.99

00:28:44.800 wanting our flesh, it makes me think about your language around black feminist flesh analytics and

00:28:52.100 native feminist flesh analytics, and I don't know, I think I know what you mean,

00:28:58.920 But I would love to hear, yeah, how that language weaves into and how your theory around the flesh analytics weaves into this craving of the earth for our presence with them.

00:29:18.200 Not for our death, which I think white supremacy and terrorism and all of these things has meant that our bodies have come back to the earth too early.

00:29:28.920 but rather this actual this eros this erotic relationship of our bodies and the land

00:29:35.200 that was heavy Bronte that was heavy yeah yeah oh thank you for that that was a lot of

00:29:46.340 deep sharing right there and so I agree with like the Atlantic Ocean in particular does not play

00:29:54.800 oh my gosh it does not play is that that's where you yeah I was at the Atlantic

00:30:00.260 yo I had an experience with the Atlantic in Puerto Rico on a similar kind of taking for

00:30:08.680 granted that I was on a day excursion in between conference sessions when

00:30:15.200 our conference should not have even been in Puerto Rico number one so again

00:30:21.280 diasporan people watch how you travel right the ethics of travel how you decide to

00:30:27.360 encounter other diasporan people who are saying look we're colonized

00:30:32.180 now we're in an antagonistic relationship with the nation that you're coming from

00:30:38.060 right so step carefully perhaps come when you're invited right i didn't do that and i thought i

00:30:46.100 was gonna have a pleasurable like just waiting with the Atlantic I got worked there were moments

00:30:52.140 I was scared and I'm a pretty a pretty strong swimmer I've been swimming for a long time my

00:30:58.160 daddy taught me really early right um the ocean was like not today hon

00:31:04.680 it was worn out for the week it was like no try again on some other terms not today

00:31:13.100 we're not playing with you um but yeah like to get back to your question of flesh and and

00:31:23.040 alchemy is a flesh I'm I'm starting to think and feel through it seriously really for the first

00:31:30.840 time like right now to like give it some deep attention I'm not done with the flesh I know that

00:31:39.080 it has become a heavily circulated keyword that's what i'm gonna say in the academy in

00:31:47.700 the humanities right now and used all kinds of ways some that i recognize resonate with

00:31:54.640 totally appreciate vibe with you know the way that um people have given attention to what 0.80

00:32:02.880 Hortense Spillers is doing. It's really important. There are other people doing wild stuff with it.

00:32:09.400 People who don't want to be transformed by a Black feminist word are doing wild stuff with it. 0.94

00:32:16.320 And I'm trying to let that notion of flesh, particularly around its erotic lines and pulses,

00:32:24.740 change me in the way that you're saying. And so one of the things that I appreciate that you just

00:32:32.200 said is I want to deal with how the fleshiness of the earth works on us and calls us particularly

00:32:39.940 black folks and I had been a little bit stuck and one of my colleagues helped me get unstuck

00:32:48.500 and what I mean by that is I was in wow again another space where the academy invited me as

00:32:58.760 well as some other colleagues Hawaii right another space that I didn't have enough contacts like I

00:33:07.260 was able to connect with the brilliant artist and poet Joy Anamoto who helped us create space

00:33:17.180 and introduced us to and reintroduced us to some spaces that we needed to be in right relationship

00:33:22.980 with while we were in Hawaii but I was on a panel and I was struggling and I was I was trying to

00:33:31.840 articulate that I wondered if there was a way for indigenous folks and black folks so indigenous

00:33:39.700 folks of many nations and black folks of many ethnicities and nations and kinds of identities

00:33:46.460 that exceeded nation and state to develop a shared language. And I was struggling with it.

00:33:53.240 And I was openly just kind of struggling with where are the spaces that we're code switching

00:33:59.320 or speaking the same language, but specifically about land. And I was like, I don't know if we

00:34:05.120 necessarily have it. And I don't know if that's a problem. It's certainly not a deficiency on

00:34:10.140 black studies part or black people's part and my colleague Cersei's Mendez who takes Santeria

00:34:18.380 seriously in that kind of ceremonial space and what happens to what we know is western gender

00:34:25.840 in that space um how it's reoriented and reconfigured was like maybe you're focusing

00:34:31.920 too much on language itself and there are some restrictions around that just in the way that

00:34:38.060 you're talking about English Bronte everything is not about language what you say or write some of

00:34:45.260 it is is in dance right and she was like you know think about the dance for Yemaya right that's

00:34:53.640 deeply about the water and ecology that's its own kind of grammar right what happens at the level

00:35:00.040 the body that again can't be translated has to be experienced co-witnessed between Black and

00:35:09.860 Indigenous people so it's bringing me to Black and Indigenous spaces of ceremony perhaps even

00:35:16.740 since you gifted me with this laughter right gut-busting laughter right that's that's the 0.98

00:35:24.400 space of the flesh and that's the alchemy I'm trying to get to like the doing and the changing

00:35:29.900 and transforming that I'm trying to to get to and articulate and will certainly be thinking

00:35:36.620 with the work you're doing particularly dance that you're doing I can't wait to see some pieces of

00:35:42.840 this project at least those that could have been I guess archived for us through video moving image

00:35:50.120 and even still again beyond the body but the flesh what is flesh flesh both um at the ecological

00:35:59.140 level, land, water, sky, and our flesh is deeply connected to that. What does that mean? What is

00:36:08.160 that changing and shaping and manifesting and giving us? So that's what I think that I'm feeling

00:36:15.320 through and working through right now. And we'll see what it means to bring that to language and

00:36:20.880 what other tools I have to use perhaps performance and voice um and some non-spoken things to get to

00:36:31.260 that wow thank you oh wow wow wow thank you thank you to the bringing in the dance it feels like

00:36:41.980 that and i i was thinking about how you you're kind of dancing um i don't recall what chapter

00:36:50.840 i think it's your chapter around uh the erotic and native and indigenous uh black and indigenous

00:36:58.320 relations where you start to kind of speak about this dance or this distance between the language

00:37:06.840 of sovereignty and abolition and this question if is is the word coalition can that do it for us

00:37:17.420 you talk about how quote perhaps coalition as as Billy Ray Belcourt argues about sovereignty has

00:37:26.440 been weighted down in political speak I contend that discourses of coalition often foreclose

00:37:33.140 conversations about sex erotics and black and indigenous futures unquote um and i've been

00:37:40.940 thinking about this kind of your questions that i feel are so critical around the concepts of

00:37:51.640 of native sovereignty and anti-black racism and all of the things that sovereignty means

00:37:58.440 and is it the word is it about place is it about the earth is it about the nation state

00:38:05.840 and you you offer this question quote while native sovereignty as a concept has stretched

00:38:12.040 and changed due to the stress of internal pressure can it change in relation to black

00:38:18.060 people's needs and desires I wonder if you might speak to more around complicating the concepts

00:38:25.420 of sovereignty and also you spoke to a reviewer challenging you back about they said quote for

00:38:33.960 whom is sovereignty important and in what what moment and so I wonder about this dance between

00:38:40.860 yeah sovereignty and black abolition where does black liberation live in native sovereignty

00:38:46.560 where does native sovereignty and black liberation actual or native liberation

00:38:54.300 find discord or friction

00:38:57.680 and how my intimacy or queerness

00:39:01.380 kind of, yeah, shift that relationship.

00:39:05.400 And where does language fail us

00:39:07.120 in that imagination?

00:39:10.840 Yeah, that was a chapter

00:39:15.020 that really challenged me

00:39:17.560 for a number of reasons.

00:39:19.640 Just to, again, right at the...

00:39:24.300 Right at the edge and the limits of language that Billy Ray Belcourt really helped me think about, right?

00:39:32.740 His work was critical for allowing an opening, right? I see Belcourt's work as pressing

00:39:42.020 on the question of Native sovereignty in a deep way in which, one, Billy Ray Belcourt is invested

00:39:54.400 in native people's uh liberation and freedom and emancipation like seriously as a creed person

00:40:02.260 right and had an ethical engagement with perhaps some of the hard edges of the way that political

00:40:12.200 speak trapped these really capacious and porous notions of sovereignty right and was as a poet

00:40:22.180 was paying attention to where western language and notions of like bounded individual selves

00:40:30.240 crept into in violent ways indigenous notions of fleshiness right of erotics of a capacity to change

00:40:40.700 and change in relationship to the other and i extended his discussion of that space of erotics 0.97

00:40:48.720 So he's explicitly, as a queer and indigenous queer theorist, talking about sex and fucking, 0.99

00:40:55.220 right? 0.99

00:40:55.560 So literally talking about that space as being a space of radical encounter, right?

00:41:02.520 And saying that, yeah, there's something that political speech is not giving us that our

00:41:08.920 own erotic practices and desires can give us.

00:41:11.960 And we need to turn to that if we really want to think about indigenous futures, right?

00:41:18.720 And wasn't explicitly trying to speak to Black studies, but I thought I found him deeply engaged with some of the ways that Afro-pessimists, I'm speaking specifically of Jared Sexton's The Vale of Slavery, was troubling Native studies.

00:41:35.200 And I really think that there was a conflation happening between white settler colonial studies and Native studies, who's calling them the same thing when they're not, right?

00:41:43.360 Because it's certainly his form of Native studies or Native decolonization was one that didn't account for Billy Ray Belcourt's thoughts, right? And Billy Ray Belcourt's notion of what Indigenous futurity meant.

00:41:59.440 And so I was really trying to deal with this debate, right, that said, you know, Native sovereignty is really about recognition. And that's something that Black folks don't have. And I was like, I don't think so.

00:42:14.880 And this is the problem, yeah, with us not talking to each other, which is not the fault of the individual scholar, right? There's a way that Black Studies gets cordoned off from or sequestered from Native Studies when you're an academic, right?

00:42:30.700 And when you produce from the space of the academy and you're not necessarily in relationship with, I'm not going to say in coalition with, in relationship with Indigenous folks outside of the academy and even outside of political spaces like nonprofit organizations or a formal coalitional group,

00:42:53.340 there's a lot that you miss about how Black folks and Indigenous folks are trying to relate to one

00:43:00.920 another, right? They're not just nuances, but the kind of fleshy, transformative experiences that

00:43:09.580 we have with one another, like in the trenches with one another, right? And I am, I can't believe

00:43:18.340 that I'm forgetting this person's name Melanie Yazzie Shania Curtis and I were on a round table

00:43:25.480 at Spelman and this um sister who I really feel like she is from perhaps the the southwest and I

00:43:37.420 I don't want to definitely misname her um and her nation and her people but she was talking about

00:43:46.200 her experience of being a sex worker and living with another sex worker and negotiating the kind

00:43:58.920 of violence that they both experienced in caring for one another. So her sister was in need of

00:44:06.180 surgery. And so she was talking about how she had to go on, I think it was Backpage at the time,

00:44:14.400 there was a I forget who I don't know if it was Kamala Harris who was trying to like criminalize 0.53

00:44:20.680 the use of that particular like classified space in publications print and online publications 1.00

00:44:27.680 that sex workers were using they're trying to regulate it in the name of helping out sex workers 1.00

00:44:32.780 right but was talking about having to do some sex work that was precarious in order to help her

00:44:40.800 trying to get the medical care that she needed and so she was talking about that as like deep

00:44:45.240 relational space and so I'm like when folks in the academy talk about coalition and black and

00:44:53.140 indigenous relations as being fraught and hindered by notions of sovereignty they don't think about

00:45:00.080 those spaces like the everyday spaces where we need each other to survive and what we're willing

00:45:05.060 to risk, put on the line, care for each other, that again, like Billy Ray Belcourt is saying,

00:45:12.220 exceeds language. Like it's, it's not this issue of sovereignty, both for Black and Indigenous

00:45:18.500 people cannot be overwritten as something that's already resolved or decided for us

00:45:24.480 by Western language. And if we get really honest with ourselves and our desire and attraction for

00:45:32.840 people particularly interracially like who we're deciding to partner with and fuck um we're doing 0.84

00:45:44.120 a lot of stuff that folks might say is deeply coalitional right but you won't call it that 0.98

00:45:50.420 because it's your personal life and you don't want to bring it to the surface and have people

00:45:54.620 scrutinize it but people are working out their relationship to white people indigenous people 1.00

00:46:02.980 folks of color black folks are doing this through like fucking and who they choose to 0.99

00:46:07.900 have as as partners right talk about that and that's where the stuff gets real that's where 1.00

00:46:15.220 we figure out how we're invested in one another's well-being and futurity and those are the terms in

00:46:21.640 which we need to probably discuss it like we can't like biliary bell cores like we can't keep it cute

00:46:28.880 like we really can't this stuff is complicated and we're working it out sometimes through

00:46:34.260 fucking and other things and that needs to be a space of theory like let's be honest 0.89

00:46:51.640 We'll be right back. 0.99

00:47:21.640 It's like medicine on the heavens when my hips roll.

00:47:31.620 If I hold back, I might miss what I'm destined for.

00:47:36.980 yeah it makes me think how critical pleasure is to this work

00:47:53.140 and how often it's the relationship is about some sort of

00:48:02.960 the relationship is about organizing or, you know, yeah, changing our conditions or

00:48:14.700 speaking to the state or imagining that the state is what will kind of give us our power and what

00:48:23.540 our work is to do is to kind of collaborate in order to receive those reparations or freedom

00:48:30.840 from the state rather than to perhaps find what is possible between one another

00:48:38.440 um and what's possible beyond yeah what's possible beyond uh what's possible inside of

00:48:48.880 other sites of power it makes me think in your new text um that you are the anthology that you're

00:48:57.500 editing uh that you just edited otherwise worlds chris finley comes in and talks about this kind of

00:49:05.880 language of failing our way into intimacy and how we might embrace failure in the attempt

00:49:14.580 um towards intimate intimacy and says quote after all isn't working together a move toward intimacy

00:49:22.800 hasn't this always been a bit icky scary and awkward why do we expect each other to be

00:49:29.920 perfectly formed political subjects when we've all been institutionalized to think badly

00:49:35.760 of each other and ourselves and I loved this kind of imagining of maroonage and the possibilities

00:49:45.480 and pleasure of um that could come through failure which I think is something we're too afraid to

00:49:53.700 actually be willing to do um and I think that we're going to fail and I think there's I think

00:50:01.400 there's grief in that and I think grief as a part of the practice needs to be there when I think of 0.63

00:50:06.760 fucking and the energy that that brings I also think about the possibilities of ceremony and 0.92

00:50:14.340 grief work and rage and hurt what the body is allowed to do when um in that deep eros to scream 0.99

00:50:23.760 and yell out to transcend to share breath you know these other things we were talking about to be to

00:50:31.540 stay in the body um to be loved really to be loved um and i think there's yeah there's so many spaces

00:50:41.920 um I feel like that we we have an imagine that could allow us to do that for one another so yeah

00:50:50.080 I'm curious as we close um I remember I am last night when I was talking to my partner Jordi we 1.00

00:50:57.820 were talking about where do we where do we meet beyond the wound black and indigenous folks is 0.99

00:51:05.240 the wound the only place that we can meet? We were thinking of Dr. Bayo Komalafe, a colleague 0.57

00:51:12.020 and friend's language that he often brings up around dehiscence, or I don't know how to pronounce

00:51:19.100 it. I think it's dehiscence, but it means it's a surgical complication where the edges of a wound

00:51:27.100 no longer meet. And I was thinking a lot about this, not wanting to only focus on our wounds,

00:51:33.560 but are our wounds the only place that we meet and i see you in your project describing you know

00:51:41.860 quote dragging settler colonial logic offshore how does that provide what does that provide

00:51:49.480 to the dance of how we get free with one another and is the shoal we were talking about is the

00:51:56.460 shoal actually a time not a place and how we might want to displace liberation because

00:52:04.020 we were chatting about this elder orland bishop who said to me when i was headed from oakland to

00:52:11.620 memphis to be and sit at the lorraine motel before led to life's 50th anniversary ceremonies of dr

00:52:18.340 king's assassination i said to him i don't know why i'm taking the train and he said it's because

00:52:25.240 you're going to a time not a place and the act of the act of marching was actually

00:52:34.300 the anticipation of knowing that we were committing and agreeing to another relationship to time

00:52:41.860 to our freedom and so the body and the gesture moving through place was just acknowledging that

00:52:48.720 agreement um and so so a couple of different things there as we end failure intimacy

00:52:56.560 time and what's what's beyond the wound here for us 0.58

00:53:02.420 with black and indigenous folks if you might leave us with a little prophecy 1.00

00:53:06.500 you can't leave me with that

00:53:11.740 our dwindling time and we will reconnect on this but I think you said it wow like

00:53:21.500 marching is the creation of time right in the preparation for a shift like why am I

00:53:30.260 yeah this is this is about moving to a time and it makes me think to try to encapsulate

00:53:37.780 some of my thoughts and move towards where you're thinking of taking us beyond the wound

00:53:45.600 of Black and Indigenous betrayal, or where we may have been perceived to betray each other.

00:53:52.120 I had just had the opportunity on Monday to think about this, because someone who was

00:53:57.580 in the audience of our panel for Dark Laboratory and Electric Marinage was asking specifically

00:54:06.940 about a map that I look at an 18th century map in my second chapter and why I had not focused

00:54:14.800 more on the Cherokee practice of slavery right and it was like I definitely want to address that

00:54:23.380 and talk to talk to that but I also was challenged to and invited the challenge of

00:54:30.360 thinking about a time before that became the central narrative about Cherokee and Black

00:54:39.620 people's relationship. And it was a time where I could locate a time, right, that 1757 map

00:54:49.840 where Black life and Indigenous life was oriented towards insurrection, right, and a resistance,

00:54:58.280 a mutual kind of resistance to fell a particular kind of conquistador settler order.

00:55:06.460 So on that map, I see that, right?

00:55:08.620 That was before, not that there hadn't been moments of betrayal where the Cherokee were

00:55:16.120 not returning captives, but before slavery had become an institution, right?

00:55:22.700 And a capital making kind of venture for the Cherokee nation, right?

00:55:27.600 It was before that. And it was also a place where I was talking to Jessica Marie Johnson about the use of forts, the ways that conquistador settlers were using forts.

00:55:40.840 There were also places of imprisonment.

00:55:44.440 There were holding cells, right?

00:55:45.740 There were places where both folks who had been captured, Cherokee folks who had been captured, who were part of warring forces who were trying to beat back the settlers and also enslaved folks who were planning insurrection or planning slave rebellions, they were held together, right?

00:56:06.520 They were held in those forts as captives together.

00:56:09.340 So our initial spaces of incarceration, right, were ones that were Black and Indigenous spaces of capture, right? And so I was thinking about, we not only have the wounds, right, of the Cherokee practice of slavery, but we have a time before then where that deal had not been wagered, right?

00:56:29.900 um that those particular terms of Cherokee sovereignty had not um had not been settled

00:56:38.140 right and so we have times while we still have the the wound we have times before we have times

00:56:44.180 after right um not that the afterlife of slavery and that trauma isn't still with us particularly

00:56:50.520 around the freedmen, right? But still, we have times to revisit and think about our relationship

00:57:00.760 of rebellion to conquest and the settler colonial project here. And I feel, again, the pulse of that,

00:57:09.600 a revisiting of that time so forcefully right now, Bronte, through the work you're doing,

00:57:15.880 the work that my colleagues are doing um particularly indigenous and native feminists

00:57:20.680 are doing because we can access those times we do have the capacity to access those moments right

00:57:28.460 and reinvigorate them and reactivate them and bring them into a now we do yeah so thank you for

00:57:35.900 that offering of time right another kind of deep alone of time wow thank you so much tiffany for

00:57:44.160 this such a powerful conversation i'm reminded of a muskogee elder when i was in atlanta for

00:57:52.680 those king ceremonies uh in april of 2018 someone connected us to have a conversation and i don't

00:58:00.460 remember this brother's name but i remember he closed the conversation saying may we continue

00:58:05.500 to walk each other home um and so i i pray that we continue to do that that black and indigenous

00:58:12.320 folks continue to do that for one another and that it's not necessarily yeah my friend Esperanza

00:58:20.580 shared recently of her mom reading an article about a houseless family and they were interviewing

00:58:27.540 the child and being like uh how uh how does it feel now to have a house and he said oh we were

00:58:34.720 never we always had a home we just needed a house to put our home into um so I'm just feeling that

00:58:43.040 that home as something that is that's offshore and that can't be found in this story of the state

00:58:52.120 can't be given to us so thank you for your practice and fugitivity and your scholarship

00:58:56.680 and this amazing conversation.

00:58:59.980 I'm so excited to keep talking to you.

00:59:03.500 Exactly, Bronte.

00:59:05.140 Happy birthday, birthday twin.

00:59:07.260 I look forward to talking to you.

00:59:09.660 Thank you.

00:59:10.580 Happy birthday.

00:59:19.980 Thank you for listening to part two

00:59:22.240 of Bronte Velez's conversation

00:59:24.120 with Tiffany Lethavo King.

00:59:25.840 The music you heard today was by Jordi Rosales and Ashia Karana.

00:59:31.660 For the Wild is created by Ayanna Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Julia Jackson.

00:59:55.840 Thank you.

For The Wild - December 14, 2022

TIFFANY LETHABO KING on The Black Shoals [with brontë velez], Part Two ⧸316

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