June 10 2025: Until We Are Free
(Book cover "of “Until We Are Free”. Photo from Google)
A discussion about Chapter 5 - Towards Black and Indigenous Futures on Turtle Island: A Conversation.
The chapter features a conversation between Robyn Maynard (Assistant Professor of Black Feminisms in Canada at University of Toronto-Scarborough, Department of Historical and Cultural Studies) and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (writer, musician, PhD Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Manitoba), from the anthology “Until We are Free” prepared by founders and core members of Black Lives Matter Toronto.
“I can’t think of a future for Indigenous peoples without listening very deeply to the visions of the future articulated by Black peoples-artists, scholars, activists, and visionaries. The kind of future I’m interested in is the kind of present I’m interested in: one that is based on Black and Indigenous freedom, self-determination, and one that continually generates Black and Indigenous life.
I had the privilege of writing a lot of “As We Have Always Done” during the beginnings of Black Lives Matter becoming visible to white Canada. My territory is the north shore of Lake Ontario. Our communities have experience being together for four centuries. Reading Robyn’s book it became very clear to me that I cannot possibly fully understand the impact of colonialism on my people (and all of life, actually) without understanding the history, contemporary, and global structure of slavery and anti-Blackness-on one hand, to work to not be complicit it and to stand in solidarity with Black movements... It Is a political imperative
that I educate myself with this incredible body of work... created by Black freedom fighters, writers, artists, and scholars so that I can fully understand how the forces of domination operate through white supremacy, heteropatriarchy,
and capitalism.”
A: This passage is talking about solidarity between two oppressed groups that have suffered under the hand of white supremacy, the patriarchy, and, the worst of all, capitalism. I think this chapter explores Black and Indigenous solidarity work and helps to redefine mutual activism and allyship.
B: I think I read something about non-critical participation and how it helps people achieve higher positions in society?
A: One of the things that I found to be most influential about this chapter for me is just understanding how two groups that deal with similar issues but in a different font not only learn how to perpetuate it but also how to end it. Here are one of the other quotes that I really enjoyed (below).
“Another way that helps me centre the interweaving realities faced by Black and Indigenous communities is by thinking about anti-Black racism through the prism of state violence with a historical lens. Slavery was one mechanism of racial control, but when it was abolished many of the ways of viewing and treating Black life were carried forward within the criminal justice system, the child welfare system, within schooling and more. These are all, as well, institutions that are foundational to settler-colonial violence.”
A: I think what’s interesting is that it is able to highlight and navigate that there’s nothing new to tools of oppression. I feel like when people say that “the master’s tools does not take down the master’s house” - the house isn’t where the master stays but where people are put to separate you from others. The tools that are used for exploitation - we are put within them. We might be able to understand and use something and to build something out of it all.
“Activists and organizers in our communities are pointing to a series of issues that both our communities face and that are linked (although there are critical differences as well): state violence, the missing and murdered, the school-to-prison pipeline, the child welfare system, racist policing and the prison industrial complex, abolition, anti-intellectualism in the academy, erasure in white Canadian society, and the relentless white denial of Canada’s legacy of slavery, anti-Blackness, and colonialism.”
A: One thing I want to emphasize - the erasure of Blackness in Canadian society through emphasizing whiteness. I worked on a presentation highlighting Black sources being used and I ran into an issue where Black people in Canada suddenly disappeared, resulting in research gaps. Like, Black people came here in the 16th century through the Underground Railroad and they disappeared until the 1930s. Even with Indigenous practices, there are so many things that are omitted, like racial profiling and residential schools. I can say that I tried to listen and I tried my best to find their stories, but I can’t imagine how frustrating it would be for them for wanting to see yourself in a country using your history but you’re nowhere to be found.
“Uncritical Indigenous participation in state reconciliation and recognition complicates this because it is currently affording certain Indigenous peoples more power, visibility, and access to the power structures of colonizers. I see a lot of co-option. I don’t sec structural changes that disrupt colonial worlds. Black and Indigenous activist communities are showing the rest of us that with ethical relationship-building based on consent and accountability from within both our communities, we can be effective co-resistors. Robyn’s book is important to the Indigenous community because she affirmed our presence, our issues, and our scholarship, compelling the Indigenous academic and writing communities to do the same. It opens the door for conversations like the one we are having tonight. It opens the door for relationships beyond retweeting.
Co-resistors, as you term it, is a beautiful way to think about this; in some ways it’s descriptive of the present moment, but it is also aspirational and can help us bring
this into our future praxis.”
A: That’s the main thing I wanted to focus on: the word ‘co-resistors’. I like it better than the word ‘ally’. The issue I have with ally and allyship is that it always feels very passive and performative. One of the things that it says is that “it opens a relationship beyond retreating.” The book does great in talking about activism and digital activism and how it helps, but it also talks about activism in action, forward-thinking, and thought. But tweeting is passive. Being an ally can be seen as passive. I can say I care about freeing Palestine and about Turtle Island, but what am I doing to help build resistance and anti-colonial mindset? The idea of being a co-resistor…
B: …brings action to the front of the page.
A: It does. It shares an existing burden. There’s a burden there in terms of white supremacist thought and there are things that come in resisting. But there’s fatigue in resisting. Like in supporting the cause of Palestine, I wonder how long I would verbally be this outspoken if I didn’t have things like these [Circles] to help me. I find all around me that there are people who pick up the conversations when I feel like I’m just banging my head into a wall. It helps me to feel less alone. In moments like these, I feel like I get to be a co-resistor rather than an ally, because even if I can’t do as much hands on, there’s boycotting, calling out behaviors, being a safe person, being a conversationalist. I hope that people would think to do all of these things for the Black cause. I can’t ever forget classmates telling me “so, I’m only gay, so I can’t talk about racism” - it’s literally the same thing but a different approach. It’s just biases based off of your lifestyle.
Another part that resonates with me is that this chapter drives home the point that everything is connected. Going back to the ‘master’s house’ analogy, if we’re all separated and people don’t remember to come together, we can’t really do much apart, which ends up downplaying the impact and power that one can truly have. If we only consider it as allyship to support versus actively doing stuff and actively co-resisting, it creates a very different narrative. One of the things that really emphasizes intersectionality to address global issues is the following quote:
“Discussions of land and place have been, in many ways, central to Black freedom and unfreedom: the formulation of nation states, which of course were also violently imposed onto pre-existing Indigenous communities, have always been hostile to Black life, … But this does mean, then, that what we are up against is having no “rightful” place anywhere within the current global logics, living, as we largely do, in nation states premised on the expulsion of our humanity. And not just our humanity, but our entire being: as we are now seeing massive deportations of Black folks worldwide.”
A: So even before all of that, I also thought of Palestinians and this idea of the rightful place to exist that doesn’t feel like it’s being haunted by exploitative history. This idea of finding a sound place to exist came up a lot.
B: It’s not like it’s meant to be an ethnostate thing right?
A: What do you mean? I was thinking more of a place that you can rightfully exist without it being haunted by something like bloodshed, war, genocide, and all of these things. To exist somewhere that doesn’t hold the marks of your ancestors suffering. Is there a place like that for people whose entire place would hold something like that?
B: See the thing I believe is that if we go to where we truly belong without bloodshed and warfare, we’d end up in ethnostates all over again. We’d be around our people and we’d all develop separately like a global apartheid. The other thing we could do is have no borders and be completely free to migrate. But the reality is that no place exists without bloodshed and conflict.
A: When I was younger, I thought about what it meant if it came, for me as a Black person, to be happy. Like as a Black person on this earth. White people say like I’m 50% German, with a bit of Cocker Spaniel and white bread. Then my great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother is from France. But Black people’s last names have been erased and only reflect the plantations. So I think about a rabbit hole of going to find my ancestry. But even if I find it, I feel like it might become neo-colonization. So ethno states is weird. If you go back, what do you do, because you’re definitely a foreigner but white supremacy sees you as if you just got here? Like if you don’t fit into white normalcy, do you even belong there? The reality is that you do, because this is all that you have known.
A: I think, no. Like you and me. We talk the same, we think the same, and we sound the same as white people. I see no difference between you and me as individuals and I’m sure you think the same way. But white people will always notice the difference even if we are the same as they are.
B: I half-agree because I do recognize that a lot of the attributes that I carry I attribute to whiteness. My accent, how well I perform, my dictation, enunciation. People tell me I’m like an Oreo and I do recognize that I will always have a Western mentality. I will never not be affected by colonialism. I will always be a benefitter and a victim of colonialism and capitalism. But I never try to align with it on purpose because I’m okay with my ethnicity. The moment I’m okay with it is when I end up aligning with the notions of racism and colonialism. I become a part of the spear of white superiority. I would rather align myself with the community and with notions of unionizing. I think that if we think about normalcy and what it means to assimilate and think of it more as what it means to be unified, then I think it changes drastically in who and what we see in forming an identity outside of the mechanisms of a white power structure. So I might be like that, but do I want to? No. I would rather align with hard-working people who eventually get exploited. LIke what is going on in the US and the massive deportations and illegal ICE raids, and how so many blue collar people are like “what’s going on? That’s not a criminal, that’s my fellow man and coworker.” Even though they are both working very similar jobs, and even though they are both in the same capitalist environment, they are seeing past the capitalist idea of just being cogs in a machine, and humanizing togetherness. Like we see white people making videos of bringing back someone from being detained. This brings back the notion of being co-resistors, this isn’t just a part of what normalizes experience, and another thing of standing up for it, not for your own benefit, but the benefit of others.
