Missing Witches - EP 255 WF - Patty Krawec： We Survive Together Or Not At All (Part 2)

00:00:00.000 If you want to support the Missing Witches project, join the coven, find out how at missingwitches.com,

00:00:06.980 or buy our books, New Moon Magic and Missing Witches, and check out the Missing Witches Deck of Oracles. 1.00

00:00:14.080 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 0.99

00:00:17.120 Be a witch. Be a witch. Be a witch. Be a witch. Be a witch. Be a witch. 1.00

00:00:20.660 You must be a witch. 0.89

00:00:21.900 How many times have we picked up a book and found this kind of nebulous thing in our head 0.77

00:00:29.860 articulated so beautifully on the page? And that was what I really hoped becoming Kim would do

00:00:35.240 for Indigenous people. Not that I thought I had anything to teach them because I didn't grow up

00:00:39.560 with my Ojibwe community, but I hoped it would give them language to be able to address the

00:00:45.520 things that they did know. You know, reading can do that for us. It can validate us. It teaches us

00:00:50.000 other ways of seeing the world. I will often read intentionally. That sounds silly. Of course,

00:00:55.920 we read intentionally. But I mean, like knowing the things that I don't know, and then deciding

00:01:01.100 to do, well, let's just read, and not just one book about white nationalism, which is what I'm

00:01:06.860 reading right now. But let's read lots of books and get lots of different perspectives. I'm not

00:01:11.100 interested in the perspectives of the powerful. I feel like I'm surrounded by those perspectives

00:01:15.780 constantly. I don't need to give them 50% of my time. I don't need to give them 50% of my brain.

00:01:21.060 I need to read from all the marginalized pupils. How do Black women understand this? And not just 1.00

00:01:26.640 allowing one author to speak on behalf of all Black women, but lots of them. That's the internal

00:01:31.620 piece. But when we read collectively, when we read in book clubs, when we read, when our friend

00:01:39.860 and I decide, you know, we're going to read the same book and then talk about it, that moves us

00:01:43.900 to action. That moves us to not just imagining a different world, but thinking about how we can put

00:01:50.880 these ideas into practice. And we can do that with fiction as well. Fiction is really powerful

00:01:57.360 because it offers us alternatives. What if the water had agency? What would it be doing

00:02:04.300 in the years before slavery was abolished? People taught slaves to read. They weren't allowed to

00:02:10.740 read, because reading changes us, particularly when we read collectively. I don't know, my writing

00:02:16.300 keeps being described as generous and invitational. I don't often feel that way. I often feel very

00:02:21.320 angry. But our movements do need joy, and they do need welcome. And if that's a risk, that's a risk.

00:02:28.160 We're just going to have to take it, because why would we build a world nobody wants to live in?

00:02:33.460 I think if you can balance angry and generous, you've really found a voice.

00:02:40.740 to a lot of us. I can't give a workshop on that. No, I did that.

00:02:46.960 That might be part of that might be down to my editor, but she's never asked me to take out

00:02:51.880 anything that sounded overly hostile. If anything, some of the hostility was encouraged by her. So

00:02:57.760 it's not like I became generous because the white lady softened me. On a day of being really annoyed,

00:03:02.800 I referred to myself in the text as a bad Indian. She highlighted and said,

00:03:08.260 this might make a great title at which point i had to basically rework the book

00:03:13.420 to thread the bad indians theme through the whole book

00:03:16.820 yeah no i never find it hostile it's i mean i think for myself at least like i'm very aware

00:03:29.020 and as weird as i can be i guess at this point in my life of how white feminism works in me and 0.55

00:03:36.920 Like, I'm really thankful for when I can get it called out so that I can, like, take it off as another level.

00:03:45.120 You know, like, once you see it, Maya Angelou said, you know better, you do better. 0.96

00:03:49.740 You know, once you see it, you're sort of like, okay, let me get that off my neck then and stop being such a douchebag. 0.93

00:03:56.640 Maybe I can do something a bit better. 0.90

00:03:59.580 Yeah, I mean, and we're all raised in this, right?

00:04:03.040 Like it's in the TV shows we watch and the books, you know, the mass market books that we read, it's everywhere.

00:04:09.340 So, of course, I'm going to be constantly picking white supremacy and gender binaries out of my life.

00:04:17.380 It's the soup I was raised in.

00:04:20.520 And so, of course, I'm going to be constantly unpicking that.

00:04:22.760 And I am so grateful for people who have taken the time to correct me.

00:04:27.320 And I often say, you know, when somebody takes that time, that's such a gift.

00:04:30.780 It means they believe in you.

00:04:33.040 it means they believe that you want to do better that you don't want to cause the harm that you're

00:04:37.940 causing and sure you get defensive sometimes because you're like but I can also push through

00:04:45.760 that and say okay you know what thank you thank you I'm gonna I'm gonna readjust my thinking a

00:04:52.040 bit because because we have to we have to otherwise we're not going to survive together

00:04:56.520 that's like the theme like when I do keynotes and stuff surviving together is kind of the general

00:05:01.480 theme that i bring to the table because we survive together or not at all if we don't

00:05:06.220 get our shit together and start looking past ideological differences or maybe we don't all

00:05:13.140 want the same end goal but there are things in the meantime that we can agree on and let's work 0.96

00:05:17.420 on those things you know ruth wilson gilmar tells an amazing story in golden gulags about forming a

00:05:24.120 coalition against prison building that included people who weren't abolitionists

00:05:28.600 but they all agreed that a prison in this town was not going to be good for that town

00:05:34.100 they didn't have to all agree on everything in order to achieve this common goal and along the

00:05:40.140 way they learned stuff from each other and some of them became abolitionists along the way and

00:05:46.400 others did not and that's okay that's okay because we survived together

00:05:50.540 i was really excited by this piece you wrote who we listen to matters theoretical physicist

00:06:00.400 and activist shanda prescott weinstein has spoken and written extensively about the ways in which

00:06:04.740 dominant science is enmeshed with white supremacy which assumes a particular way of being in the

00:06:09.780 world in the disordered cosmos a journey into dark matter space time and dreams deferred prescott

00:06:15.420 Weinstein, reflects in the work of particle physicist, quantum theorist, and feminist

00:06:19.740 theorist Karen Barad, American, who wrote that while quantum mechanics challenges the idea that

00:06:25.300 the universe can be broken down into separately knowable parts, physicists have yet to allow this

00:06:29.800 lesson to impact their approach to thinking through what we call the most fundamental basic

00:06:34.740 objects in the universe. Quantum physics, Barad notes, is the purview of primarily Western-trained

00:06:40.480 males. As a result, Prescott Weinstein suggests that what we know will stay incomplete until we

00:06:46.840 are able to think beyond the ways that white men are trained to think. Bad Indians like Hannah 0.98

00:06:52.320 Burgess, who proposed writing a dissertation without citing any white men, know that without 0.73

00:06:57.460 us, it is incomplete. But despite knowing better, these white male theorists have decided that

00:07:03.220 certain things can be broken down into separately knowable parts and that they know them. And this

00:07:09.580 conversation about science, Ben brought up the work of Lawrence Gross and the quantum nature of

00:07:14.760 the Anishinaabe language, which orients around verbs and process rather than nouns. Prescott

00:07:20.120 Weinstein reflected that while English is very useful for something, that may not be the most

00:07:24.200 useful language for everything. What could be known about quantum physics and the world we

00:07:29.020 inhabit is scientists had access to language that reflected the processes they study.

00:07:34.140 The language we use to study the world around us shapes what we're able to learn,

00:07:37.620 And it may be that subaltern scientists and the quantum nature of their language hold a key to that knowing.

00:07:48.580 What that made me think about, it was early, no surprise, early in my academic life, I studied history. 0.97

00:07:57.240 I've always loved history.

00:07:58.840 And if you want to study history, one of my early professors, that was when I went to university and basically played euchre, but I did show up for some classes.

00:08:07.620 You talked about how you have to learn other languages if you're going to read old texts, right?

00:08:12.720 Like if you're going to read about medieval Germany, you're going to have to learn Old German.

00:08:16.880 If you're going to learn about Plantagenet England, which was what I was interested in, you're going to have to learn Middle English.

00:08:23.660 So why can't physicists learn Nishinaabemoon or Lakota or these other languages that will help them think in a more quantum way, right?

00:08:33.320 if historians have to learn other languages to do their research, why can't physicists learn other

00:08:37.980 languages to do their research? I mean, the way we talk and the way we assume things about the world

00:08:43.920 around us does impact how we see it. I think because Hebrew, and again, I keep coming back to

00:08:51.820 this because I was raised evangelical. And so I feel like I still have this deep relationship with

00:08:55.980 the church, even though I'm mostly mad at it, because it could do so much. There's so much

00:08:59.840 liberatory potential that is just being wasted in the name of Christian nationalism and this 0.99

00:09:06.260 terrible apocalyptic vision that I grew up in. The Hebrew is also verb-based and relationally 1.00

00:09:13.780 oriented, not exclusively verb-based the way Anishinaabe Moen is, because I've talked to some

00:09:18.380 people who speak Hebrew about that, but there is a large emphasis on relations.

00:09:24.400 And so to me, what I look at the languages and then the political systems that evolved

00:09:28.780 alongside those languages not as a result of but alongside it makes sense why the anishinaabe

00:09:35.700 developed this kind of egalitarian non-hierarchical society which is basically an anarchist my son

00:09:42.900 likes to say if they didn't like what some leader was saying they would just wander off and listen

00:09:47.100 to somebody else they didn't even fight him they were just like dude you're whack they'd go off and

00:09:52.000 listen to somebody else and they'll show me the mohawks and you're a little more a little more

00:09:56.480 hierarchical and structured, but balanced with gender, not in the separate but equal

00:10:01.080 homelands way, but in a way that really mitigates the abuse of power by one group over another.

00:10:07.700 And so it makes sense that a language and a political system or a way of scientific inquiry,

00:10:13.680 because our knowledge is also a form of scientific inquiry, of asking questions about how things

00:10:19.700 work, positing solutions, testing those solutions, and then making decisions around agriculture.

00:10:26.480 Like, farm is great. Try to create a whole permaculture forest. That's a lot of work. That's the world that these so-called primitive hunter-gatherers lived in was vast permaculture forests. That's a lot of work to create and maintain, right? It's valuable, valuable knowledge.

00:10:42.080 But it emerged alongside a language that prioritizes relations over discrete objects and what we do with those discrete objects.

00:10:51.700 And so, of course, we're going to have a different relationship with the world than a language and a political and a scientific system that emerged out of a way of looking at discrete objects.

00:11:03.740 And I love the stories contained in our language.

00:11:07.600 But those stories are also contained in English.

00:11:10.340 my grandma had like this great thick book my german grandma this great thick book about

00:11:15.580 etymology and how language developed and like charming right charm used to be you wouldn't

00:11:22.160 want to be charming because that was basically an accusation of witchcraft and now it's not

00:11:27.000 language changes and tracking those changes and so it's really interesting i think that

00:11:31.900 it gives us kind of a glimpse into deep history as well when we think about how language developed

00:11:38.060 And it helps us look at how that history kind of shaped who we become.

00:11:43.020 Can you give some of the maybe examples in the book or just examples you can think of

00:11:47.200 to help us understand what you mean when you say it's a process-based language?

00:11:52.960 Yeah.

00:11:53.380 So my shirt, I wouldn't say in Anishinaabe Mowen, and again, I mean, I'm not a language

00:11:57.480 speaker, but I wouldn't say that my shirt is gray and blue.

00:12:00.360 I would say that it's being gray and blue.

00:12:02.840 That's what it's doing right now.

00:12:04.200 And we all know that if we put it in a washing machine, if we accidentally drop it in with the whites, it will no longer, it will be being something else, which is a way of understanding, you know, that stuff doesn't stay in a permanent state.

00:12:20.140 It shifts and it can be something else.

00:12:23.600 We can also be something else. 0.55

00:12:25.640 But even like Anin isn't just hello.

00:12:30.300 It's kind of like, I'm here.

00:12:31.820 Pay attention to me.

00:12:32.840 It's like announcing your presence. So where hello is, you know, kind of like our standard

00:12:38.820 greeting of hello, I mean, is more action. I'm here. I'm asserting my presence in this space

00:12:44.260 is what it, you know, is what it means. You know, Bamadzowin is, you know, the good life.

00:12:50.480 It's a goal that encompasses, you know, spiritual development as well as social relations. You know,

00:12:56.160 I'm trying to live a good life. We don't have a word for fiction, but we do have a way of saying

00:13:00.880 these are the stories we just made up, you know, or these are the scary story. Like it says what

00:13:04.440 they are, as opposed to, you know, kind of a discrete thing. I don't know. I'm probably not

00:13:11.820 explaining that very well. No, you totally are. And it's so cool to connect it to exactly that

00:13:17.560 duality in physics, you know, between a particle and a wave or to say that we've over focused on

00:13:24.200 the particulateness of things in part because our language and our political systems really

00:13:30.840 want things to be definite and separate and isolated and individualist. And that, you know,

00:13:39.080 physicists have discovered that there is a wave property to things, but have we really

00:13:43.640 bent our minds to thinking about the implications of the wave property of things? And maybe to do

00:13:50.380 that, we need a different language. I like a much more ancient language. Like there's a reason why

00:13:56.820 Maybe it can see the wave nature of things.

00:14:00.060 Can you talk about Paulette Steves and the word for North?

00:14:04.440 Oh, yeah, Gwedden.

00:14:05.860 So this first came to me, I heard Josh Manitowabe.

00:14:09.140 He's a prophet, Brock University, also Ojibwe from Manitoulin Island.

00:14:13.500 He was in an awesome conference I had gone to.

00:14:16.020 And he was talking about Gwedden and our word for North.

00:14:19.280 And that it contains the idea of glaciers going home.

00:14:23.340 and that was just mind-blowing to me like how did they know about glaciers because if the glaciers

00:14:30.480 are going home then we knew that they had not always been there it doesn't just go back to

00:14:36.760 the glaciers being here which is like 13 000 years ago or whatever 11 it goes back to before

00:14:43.280 they were here that's right yeah yeah there's our stories about this word and what it means

00:14:49.300 include knowledge that they hadn't always been there, that they had come down and gone back home

00:14:55.640 again, that there was a place that they belonged, and that they hadn't always been there. And so

00:15:01.640 that was just completely mind blowing to me that are not only that our word contained that history,

00:15:06.600 but that our elders knew that history. That when they could talk about that word, they knew what

00:15:11.880 that word meant. And they knew the story of that word, that it doesn't just mean north, it means

00:15:16.580 the glaciers going home. And then Dr. Paulette Steves, who's a cremati paleontologist, she argues,

00:15:24.280 so first, this idea was that we were only here for the last 3000 years. And then they, you know,

00:15:28.860 kind of grudgingly admitted it may have been a little bit longer than that. And she's basically

00:15:33.660 no, we have been here for an extremely long time, probably 100,000 years. And the only reason that

00:15:39.040 we don't find the evidence is because we're not looking for the evidence. And she talks about

00:15:43.800 archaeologists who have tried to put forward ideas of settlements that were 30 and 40,000 years old,

00:15:49.740 which completely give the lie to the Bering Strait theory. Beringia was a continent. People

00:15:55.860 did travel across it somewhat. They might have gone the other way too. Who knows? But we didn't

00:16:01.320 all come that way. Because there is evidence with the footprints found at White Sands National Park,

00:16:07.520 she talked about archaeologists that basically got drummed out of the institution for suggesting

00:16:12.780 that we had been here for more than 10 000 years now we know that we have been and those footsteps

00:16:18.960 can't be accounted for by the time frame of the Bering Strait theory and also the Bering Strait

00:16:24.780 wasn't all that passable anyway so people did live there but this column between glaciers like how

00:16:32.500 are you going to travel that like a whole lot of no man's land for generations like no absolutely

00:16:37.920 not. But we know people did travel. Maybe they came by boat. People in the Pacific were

00:16:43.260 extraordinary navigators. So who's to say they didn't come here and teach us? I have no beef

00:16:48.140 with migration and movement. Absolutely not. But this is where we emerged as people. And we emerged

00:16:53.420 here a very long time ago. We're not just other settlers who colonized the place, right? This is

00:16:59.360 where we emerged as people. And, you know, and so when Paulette does her work and the Black 1.00

00:17:06.760 Trial Collective is an organization of Black and Indigenous archaeologists as well. The first thing

00:17:13.400 they do is they talk to the local people for their own stories about that place. Not just what we

00:17:20.160 might think of as history, but also what we might think of as myths and legends, you know, because

00:17:26.000 they're dismissed because they're just too fantastical to be history. So they've got to be,

00:17:29.900 you know, made up. And the two things that I can remember from her book, which is an Indigenous 1.00

00:17:35.420 history of the western paleola something like that which it was also kind of a shot at the

00:17:43.100 whole idea of paleolithic so it's kind of a tongue-in-cheek title as well the people look

00:17:48.820 up paulette steves they'll find it there's two stories that i recall one is about the thunderbirds

00:17:53.760 because so many native cultures in the so-called americas have this these stories of thunderbirds

00:17:59.760 these great thunderbirds and she says well okay but giant pteratorns like giant black

00:18:07.340 pterodactyl like birds that existed they were huge are they not thunderbirds they would have

00:18:15.140 made a tremendous racket as they were flying across the sky with their giant wings you know

00:18:19.960 the call they made must have been terrifying you know if we think about the what ravens you know

00:18:24.620 imagine a raven with a 20 foot wingspan. You know, these were massive birds that probably

00:18:30.640 did pick up your toddler and fly away. These are huge, huge birds. So that's one thing,

00:18:36.060 thunderbirds, territory. The other story she tells comes from the Osage about these mythic beasts

00:18:42.140 that, you know, this is this big battle of these mythic beasts. And you, it was so bad that you

00:18:47.860 couldn't even cross the plains because there were just so many of them. And the Osage returned to 0.99

00:18:54.020 this place regularly for ceremony because some some thing had happened they all died and then

00:18:59.100 they were able to cross the plains and it was like yeah yeah missing legends whatever except

00:19:04.480 that then archaeologists found evidence of like this massive death of like giant and the word

00:19:13.020 just fell out of my brain elephant like things the mammoths the woolly mammoths yeah you know

00:19:18.220 these giant mammoths who all kind of died right around the same time for and they don't quite

00:19:22.620 know why, but it was exactly where the Osage have been doing their ceremonies and saying that this

00:19:26.680 thing happened. And so these stories are carried forward, you know, 10, 20,000, 30,000 years,

00:19:34.400 meaning we've been here for a very long time, being in relation with this land for a very long

00:19:40.340 time. It's not the same thing as newcomers coming here and then, you know, wrecking the place like 0.99

00:19:45.000 a Motley Crue hotel room. You know, we've been here and our stories prove it, you know, like, 0.86

00:19:51.580 You know, Tate Walker, they talk about Tisawi in, you know, White Buffalo Calf Woman.

00:19:57.240 I love this story that they tell about writing for Fierce, the anthology Fierce.

00:20:02.920 And they said it was supposed to be about a woman that you admired that kind of helped you.

00:20:07.580 And Tate wanted to write about Tisawi.

00:20:10.080 And the editors were like, no, Tisawi isn't real. 0.99

00:20:13.220 And Tate was like, well, of course she was because we have the pikes. 0.99

00:20:17.520 How do you think we got it? 0.97

00:20:18.840 and so we have evidence of things and the story that we tell around them

00:20:26.080 may not meet certain criteria of what's real and not real but we gotta also think about who's

00:20:32.000 setting those criteria and to what end because of course they're going to set the criteria in a way

00:20:36.700 that privileges them like why are all the mystical spiritual things that happen in the bible true

00:20:40.600 but the mystical spiritual things that happen for the ojibwe are not true but of course they're true

00:20:45.180 I just love Paulette Steves in the way that she writes about going to story as a way of sort of burning through so much of the clutter that fills the sciences to try to see what people have been knowing and holding on to for so long.

00:21:07.400 There's this quote from her about pyroepistemology. She writes, pyroepistemology is a term I coined, which metaphorically describes critical indigenous scholarship, a practice of pyroepistemology through the ceremony of indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing is one which cleanses the academic landscape of discussions that misinform worldviews, and fuel misunderstanding and racism.

00:21:33.680 Such literary renewal clears the way for new discussions and intellectual growth

00:21:38.020 in academic fields of thought and centers of knowledge production.

00:21:42.520 How do we do it?

00:21:43.660 How do we do pyro-akistemology, Baddie?

00:21:46.820 I don't know. 0.92

00:21:47.840 I think Bad Indians Book Club is an attempt at it.

00:21:52.460 Hannah Burgess, she had tweeted that thing out about doing her dissertation without citing

00:21:57.340 any white men.

00:21:58.860 And that intrigued me.

00:21:59.900 Like, that was what caused me to reach out to her was, hey, let's talk.

00:22:03.020 But her mentions filled with people telling her that she would be excluding experts in

00:22:07.320 the field, which was really funny because she hadn't said what her field was. 0.58

00:22:12.240 And so clearly white men are the experts on everything.

00:22:15.360 And so we had a really good conversation with her.

00:22:17.640 And that comes from Sarah Akhmad, who has a practice of not citing white men, because

00:22:23.120 citation is relationship.

00:22:24.320 How do we clear space in order to start thinking about something new?

00:22:29.460 like when my friend because this whole mess started when my friend Kyle asked for a book 0.99

00:22:34.120 they could read to help them understand indigenous thought and I was like there isn't one there's 0.98

00:22:41.600 lots of them because I didn't want I didn't want to just add one more book to their bookcase

00:22:47.540 I wanted them to clear space you got to push it all aside and read a variety of things

00:22:55.760 you know and it's the same whether it's it's a book club whether it's you know the way you're

00:23:02.680 going to enter a workplace committee you know we're not just going to rehabilitate what is

00:23:08.880 already not working we're going to clear space we're going to burn it down which is i mean that 1.00

00:23:15.560 comes from the Ojibwe practice and a lot of practices of it might be called slash and burn 0.90

00:23:20.680 agriculture but that's really destructive it could also be understood as just you know 1.00

00:23:25.160 clearing grasslands like my son who burned the grasslands in our backyard now it's like full of

00:23:29.680 wild strawberries because when you burn away you know when you use controlled burns you don't get

00:23:36.660 the massive wildfires when the fire comes through and the different trees that you plant like

00:23:41.500 quaking aspen are basically a fire break so when you take care of the forest and you take care of

00:23:47.020 it with diversity and that includes burning that includes the burning of grasslands burning of

00:23:52.700 underbrush you get rid of the stuff that leads to massive out of control you know and we can see it

00:24:01.220 in our world right now we can see when you don't allow people space to live their lives in layered

00:24:08.280 relationship when you create stateless people by insisting on ethnostates for everyone and looking

00:24:14.600 at you is real you know when you do that and trump's freaking idea of taking over gaza that's

00:24:20.540 just, I can't even with that man. He is extremely dangerous. I don't like making fun of him because 0.93

00:24:25.400 him and his policies and yeah, he's building a world that I will not be safe in, you know,

00:24:30.760 but when we do that, when we don't allow for resistance to shape our world in ways that are

00:24:37.980 healthy and constructive and wrestle with the things that need wrestling with, you're going to

00:24:43.340 get explosions. You're getting explosions on the white supremacist end of it. I'm just reading a

00:24:48.700 book right now about the white power movement, because they felt unheard and unseen. And that's 0.62

00:24:54.100 emerging in violence, but you also see it on the left. You know, we forget how violent the 70s were

00:24:59.020 at times, you know, with bombings and the weathermen and, you know, the anti-war movement.

00:25:05.000 Like King said, what do you say? Rebellions, riots are the language of the unheard.

00:25:09.920 And so a pyroepistemology is not that violent wildfire that destroys everything, which is what

00:25:16.280 people think it is, or how they might hear it. It's that controlled burn that gets rid of the

00:25:24.020 things that need to be gotten rid of so that life can thrive. It's not about burn it all down and

00:25:29.680 destroy everything. It's about let's get rid of the things that no longer serve us if they ever did

00:25:33.600 so that we can all thrive. Because now I'm back to we survive together or not at all.

00:25:39.720 You mentioned that you grew up evangelical. I wonder what your spiritual world looks like

00:25:46.500 these days. Do you draw strength from a metaphysical worldview that combines something

00:25:52.340 that you still find redemptive in the church with something that you have found in your

00:25:58.000 Anishinaabe stories? Yeah. You mentioned a vision with Dear Woman. I have a distinct memory of 0.53

00:26:07.240 sitting in church this was during I don't know more when I understood that being Ojibwe also

00:26:12.200 had a political aspect right because so much of our lives you know we're individually this or that

00:26:18.460 and then at some point we understand we come to understand that that identity those relations

00:26:23.600 also have a political component and then we start taking action in that political sense and for me

00:26:28.640 and for a lot of us that was I don't know more we started understanding our lives in a more political

00:26:33.040 sense. And I remember, I have a very distinct memory of sitting in church and hearing or

00:26:41.400 seeing or something. I don't know. I don't want to say Jesus talked to me, but that's how I

00:26:44.640 understood it at the time. I don't know if I would understand it that way now, that I was going to

00:26:48.020 have to choose. That the path I was on was just going to keep diverging and that I could no longer

00:26:55.580 kind of try to be both things that I had to choose. And it was no choice. I was like, well,

00:27:00.800 obviously I'm Ojibwe. There is no choice. And I know there are a lot of Ojibwe people who are 0.99

00:27:07.020 Christians. That is not necessarily mutually exclusive. But in that moment, it was presented

00:27:11.620 to me as mutually exclusive, that I was going to have to choose. And I was like, well, of course,

00:27:15.700 obviously I'm Ojibwe. And that was my choice. And over time, those paths have diverged. I still

00:27:22.580 speak to the church because that's where I grew up. I get invitations to talk to the church.

00:27:26.720 Becoming Ken was very much written for the church community to help them understand their

00:27:31.320 stories differently. I no longer believe that the church is the only source of truth about this

00:27:35.960 world, or that the Christian tradition is the only source of truth in this world.

00:27:42.720 I find the Ojibwe Anishinaabe cosmology just makes more sense to me.

00:27:49.580 My mom's like, you know, about believing that the moon is alive, that the world around me is

00:27:55.240 alive. And it's always, well, as long as you don't worship it. I'm like, what does that even mean?

00:27:59.320 I think I'm like, do I worship my spouse? Do I worship my kids? Like I can love something and

00:28:05.620 understand it to be alive and have agency. You know, like that's to me, that's just like more

00:28:11.940 weird evangelicalism. I would say now that I am very interested in spirit. And for me,

00:28:18.260 the Ojibwe worldview just makes the most sense in terms of understanding that we are surrounded

00:28:23.060 by sentient spiritual beings. And we are in good relation with those beings. And I was wrestling

00:28:31.360 this through, if you listen to Medicine for the Resistance, you'll kind of hear my whole

00:28:36.440 trajectory as Carrie kind of brings me into the way of the woo, kind of understanding our

00:28:42.240 spiritual existence. And at one point at a conversation with Chanda, I was talking about

00:28:47.240 this. And she says, that's just physics, Patty. It's just quantum physics. Everything is connected.

00:28:55.600 It doesn't have to be mystical. That's just physics. And that really made me laugh.

00:29:00.000 Because everything really is connected. And it's the stories we tell about those connections. And

00:29:05.160 so yes, so I would say that for me, I'm Anishinaabe. I see value in those old stories. I particularly

00:29:13.700 like reading Jewish thinkers on them I find they get us to a more liberatory and you know expansive

00:29:20.660 way of understanding those stories I find evangelical Christianity very narrow and 0.99

00:29:26.020 insular and unhelpful it's taking us to very dangerous places so I would say I have definitely

00:29:31.140 put that in my rearview mirror that's not a faith system that I'm in any way connected to I have 1.00

00:29:37.940 friends who are Christians who are part of a more liberatory practice which is really cool my son

00:29:42.060 was home for Christmas, and we went to the Metropolitan Church in Toronto, because he

00:29:45.080 wanted to go there. I'm going to be speaking at a church, Roncesvalles United, I think it is,

00:29:50.640 where Philip Cote actually has some, he's an Anishinaabe artist, has some beautiful artwork

00:29:54.940 there. So I'm going to be speaking there in June, because there is a possibility of liberation.

00:29:59.240 There are ways to read those stories. And there are just so many Christians, you can't ignore

00:30:03.280 them, right? You have to talk to them. And because I grew up there, I know the language,

00:30:07.820 but it's no longer a theology that I accept as my own it's I'm probably moving dangerously close

00:30:13.820 to animism it my mom would probably think that that was dangerous I see it as liberatory the

00:30:19.700 world is alive it's alive in all kinds of ways we don't understand and the old testament teaches

00:30:24.620 that so that's Mary Norgaard's work on the Hebrew bible and environmental ethics so I made my choice

00:30:32.200 and it was the right one that's where I end up to for sure you know I we're having a conversation

00:30:41.640 in our coven space about you know agnostic or atheist witchcraft like what is that how does

00:30:48.400 that work you know people have been asking about that and there's no sort of rules with witchcraft

00:30:52.600 witchcraft is like a set of tools you know it's like you don't have to believe the same things

00:30:57.300 to believe that you can kind of dance between your own will and the will of the universe and

00:31:01.480 try to find some space in there but I always land on this like there there may be gods and and it

00:31:07.880 might be the lake you know I live on a lake and I tend I tend to feel like if there if there are

00:31:13.820 gods it's probably all around us and right there and so I really loved I love Louise Erdrich and

00:31:20.540 I really loved stumbling upon this piece and I wonder you just above this piece you write about

00:31:26.480 the prophecy of the seventh and eighth fires and I wonder if you could talk about that too

00:31:30.760 but I just want to read this. You wrote, the land has more agency than we realize.

00:31:35.780 All our stories contain mercy too. Solomon wrote that it rains on the jest and the unjust alike.

00:31:41.560 Eagles fly overhead searching out those who are living in a good way.

00:31:45.320 We can still listen to the stones that will surely cry out. Do I really believe this?

00:31:51.160 There was a time when I wondered, do I really believe all of this? Writes novelist Louise

00:31:55.300 zerdrich i'm half german rational does this make any sense after a while such questions stopped

00:32:01.740 mattering believing or not believing it was all the same i found myself compelled to behave toward

00:32:07.460 the world as if it contained sentient spiritual beings i don't know if the land is alive not in

00:32:14.180 the way that i know my dogs are alive but it might be and i've stopped bringing home rocks that don't

00:32:19.140 belong to me you know I get in Q&A's after and this isn't the question that you're asking

00:32:27.480 but in Q&A's I inevitably get white women wanting me to absolve them of Bernadette

00:32:33.400 there's always one and I mean we're always gonna want you to absolve us of something

00:32:41.120 and I'm like you know what you just need to think about you just need to think about that you need

00:32:44.840 to think about what it means for these rocks if they really are alive which is another reason why

00:32:48.380 I had Kwe become stone and learn from stone because yes as you just kind of accept well you

00:32:55.220 know maybe they are alive maybe things are alive maybe I am surrounded by sun maybe I'll just live 0.97

00:32:59.620 as if they are I mean like the Ojibwe we don't have like a creator god who's kind of out there

00:33:04.580 in the universe somewhere creator is more creative process and again we're back to verbs and nouns

00:33:09.980 right creator is process it's the energy that Chanda says is just physics it's just physics

00:33:16.540 it's just quantum physics it's not that special do we fully understand it oh is part of that

00:33:23.480 because we're refusing to use language that helps us understand it absolutely

00:33:27.380 it's the spirit that's kind of in and around and connecting everything and we tap into it

00:33:34.120 in all sorts of ways you know and i think for me like my biggest break with christianity came when

00:33:40.500 i started collecting tarot decks because i was always like oh that's so dangerous and demonic

00:33:45.620 And it's like, no, it's just a way of telling stories.

00:33:49.360 Each tarot deck tells a different story about the world and how we relate to it.

00:33:55.320 And it's a really big world with a lot of different ways of being in relation.

00:34:02.020 And some of them are helpful and some of them are not helpful.

00:34:05.880 And we can learn from each other and we can learn how to connect.

00:34:11.100 Instead of one group kind of hoarding all of that connection, no, you can only be connected

00:34:16.880 with the spiritual world if you're part of our little group.

00:34:20.380 And then everything else is demonic and beyond redemption.

00:34:23.640 That was something a book I read recently pointed out was when something is demonic,

00:34:27.180 it's been put beyond redemption.

00:34:29.060 And we do that to people, right?

00:34:30.280 So when we demonize people, we're putting them beyond redemption.

00:34:33.740 And so that's what the church does, right?

00:34:35.520 It puts everything outside of it beyond redemption.

00:34:37.560 and how does that get us anywhere except exactly where we are politically when everybody who's not

00:34:44.400 part of your group is demonic you know and beyond redemption of course that's how we land here

00:34:49.700 and it's fear it's very fear-based especially since that group kind of fractured into eight

00:34:55.600 million groups that all believe they're the only one who hold on to it and so yeah so I love that

00:35:00.860 quote from Louise because she's like what if I just live differently wait would that be so bad

00:35:06.600 and it turns out that that gets us to someplace really good and i really like that place and

00:35:13.920 that's why you know the the subtitle for bad indians book club because we're reading at the

00:35:18.540 edge of a thousand worlds i'm not suggesting that bad indians will lead us to a new world

00:35:25.160 and that's like the seventh and eighth fires so the seventh fire is um a wildfire that destroys 0.91

00:35:31.620 everything. And how we prepare determines the outcome, right? Like my son burned a fire in the

00:35:38.780 backyard. Now we have all kinds of beautiful wild strawberries. You don't take care of things and

00:35:44.380 you get Pacific Palisades burning down, right? You get like these massive out of control wildfires

00:35:50.240 that are incredibly destructive. And that's all down to how you prepare, right? The fires are

00:35:55.080 coming. We know that. That's why our prophecies are built around fires, not nice little campfires

00:36:00.800 that you hang around and tell stories with.

00:36:02.600 These are transformative fires that change the landscape.

00:36:05.600 What the landscape looks like after that fire comes through,

00:36:08.620 entirely dependent on how we prepare for it now.

00:36:11.820 But the fire is coming.

00:36:13.520 The eighth fire is if we have prepared well.

00:36:17.000 If those of us who are part of this community

00:36:19.720 have kind of picked up our bundles and restored ourselves.

00:36:23.840 And if the newcomers basically changed their systems

00:36:27.260 to stop being so destructive. 0.98

00:36:28.640 so we take care of our stuff y'all take care of your stuff and that's how we survive together

00:36:35.460 because then the fire gives us that beautiful field full of wild strawberries or blueberries or

00:36:40.280 fireweed or any of those beautiful things that come back after a fire has come through and the

00:36:46.200 eighth fire is a time of peace and brotherhood which isn't a single world to which we must all

00:36:51.500 be conformed it's many worlds it's the swamp swamps are beautiful they get a bad rap but

00:36:56.620 they're beautiful and now I'm kind of interested in Baba Yaha I need to find some books about her

00:37:02.140 because that's you know my mom's side of the family and she also lived in a swamp so maybe

00:37:07.480 she got a bad rap too because she's supposedly like this scary woman who ate children but I

00:37:12.720 know maybe she got a bad rap too because swamps always you know they're dark and scary and they

00:37:17.120 can be but they're also full of medicine and good things and they're beautiful and that's where

00:37:22.440 plants grow and all kinds of wonderful things grow and we just want to pave them over and put

00:37:26.920 a Walmart there and that's dumb that's how you get floods so what if we all just lived that way

00:37:33.380 as if the world around us was alive took that life seriously made decisions based on that 0.69

00:37:40.020 talking to the original people of that place because they know it better than we do

00:37:44.680 and then just built a better world like would that really be so bad I don't think that would

00:37:50.600 be so bad oh patty i can't believe it's been an hour and a half i still have 73 more follow-up

00:37:58.480 questions i'm just so excited to meet you i love your writing and the way you think so much and

00:38:06.320 your work so much i'm just really really thankful that when your editor forwarded our request and

00:38:13.440 was like this is weird do you want to do this which podcast you were like i do i thought that

00:38:18.580 it's so funny like what's weird about that I know I was so happy that you're like no yeah I do that

00:38:27.280 is that is a lot of fun that is of interest to me I do want to beat the witches if people want to

00:38:34.220 find and get involved in all of your projects and want to support you can you tell them how to do

00:38:40.640 that yeah so the easiest way to find me would probably be on my poorly maintained website

00:38:46.340 danish.ca d-a-a-n-i-s.ca only because that's where the links are to everything else so it's

00:38:54.140 my blog which is thousandworlds.ca just because i was really invested in that title and so i wanted

00:38:59.120 to own it and then also payyourrent.ca which is the indykanagana foundation you're amazing thank

00:39:06.360 you so much for staying on with me for so long and for lighting us all up so much oh thank you

00:39:11.660 so much for having me i'm really excited about this one coming out and being able to yeah i'm

00:39:16.260 missing witch i'm really excited to take care of you so that you can keep doing the good work that

00:39:24.480 you're doing and telling stories and getting stories out there is work it is work and it's

00:39:31.000 important work because this is how worlds get changed feel really lucky to be part of the 0.92

00:39:37.760 thousand possible worlds that we can imagine together yes we say um blessed fucking be 1.00

00:39:44.320 You must be a witch. 1.00

Missing Witches - February 27, 2025

EP 255 WF - Patty Krawec： We Survive Together Or Not At All (Part 2)

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