CHAPTER 7

Storying Relations

In this chapter, we draw from our collective collaborations that seek to envision decolonial geographies across Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities to begin to theorize a relational methodology for collective liberation. In our dialogue over the years, we have gradually built a shared praxis and a method of engagement that is founded upon a radical sense of relationality (Yazzie and Risling Baldy 2018). We trace this methodology in formation through our genealogies as cisgender Mushkegowuk and Chicana women; we also trace how our understandings of liberation have formed through dialogue and relationship building between each other and a number of collaborators we have been in conversation with over the past several years. We theorize this method of radical relationality as being premised on slow relationship, trust building over time, an ethic of generosity and care, and critical attention to how we are differently situated in place.

Drawing on Black, Indigenous, and Latinx feminist theorists, we focus on the methods and practices through which an anticolonial, antiracist, and anticapitalist theory of collective liberation can emerge (Anzaldúa and Moraga 1981; Gilmore 2017; Simpson 2017; Yazzie and Risling Baldy 2018; Simpson and Maynard 2018; King 2019). This is a methodology that counters practices invested in anti-Black, anti-Indigenous and related forms of racial and gendered violence, by building radical relationality across BIPOC communities. The methods we cultivate are grounded in a storytelling praxis, as BIPOC people come together to listen to one another, to understand the distinct forms of violence that are embodied across Indigenous, Black, and Brown communities around the globe, and how those realities are simultaneously entangled in geometries of colonial capitalist power.¹ As stories are shared, relationships can grow; however, we have learned that such growth can come only with time, with the creation of spaces of flight that refuse colonial white supremacy and a willingness to reckon with the forms of violence that we are all implicated in.² Radical relationality as a methodology for liberation requires BIPOC people coming together to reckon with the difficult points of contention that can strain our ability to truly see one another in our desires for freedom and liberation.

We specifically focus on relationship building across BIPOC communities even though we recognize that visions of freedom articulated by Black abolition and Indigenous decolonization encompass an expansive web of relationalities with anticapitalist movements and, importantly, with other-than-human relations (Gilmore 2017; Estes 2019; Yazzie 2019). We center these relations as they are reflective of the collaborative work we have been involved in over the past several years, and more to the point, as they are reflective of the need for BIPOC communities to gather with the intention of sharing stories to truly see and understand one another and to heal from the violences that have touched our communities. While the term BIPOC is imperfect and the lexicon is constantly shifting, we utilize this term for its brevity and because we prefer it to “racialized peoples,” which implies that white people are not also racialized, and so as to not reify a language of deficit, such as “formerly colonized peoples” or “dispossessed peoples.” In using this term, we do not intend to reduce the plurality of Blackness, Indigeneity, and communities of color. Learning from evolving conversations in Latinx and Indigenous studies and communities that are informed by Black thinkers and organizers, we recognize how the term “people of color” can erase the plurality of experiences embodied by people who are brought together under this term, including how people are differentially racialized under umbrella ethnic identities such as Latinx, how individuals can unevenly benefit from white privilege, and how anti-Blackness is reproduced when we are complicit with or actively erase these realities. At the same time, collective liberation requires astute examinations of white supremacy and how BIPOC lives are intimately woven together through our distinct though entangled experiences of the ongoing colonial theft of our homes, relations, and humanity. For this reason, we use the imperfect term BIPOC here but specifically highlight Black and Indigenous peoples and relationalities when appropriate, for this differentiation is necessary to address particular embodied geographies and experiences.

We situate our theorizing and methodological renderings of radical relationality amid the foundational genealogies and epistemologies of Black, Indigenous, Chicana, and Third World feminisms, from which intersectional theory emerged (Combahee River Collective 1977; Anzaldúa and Moraga 1981; Crenshaw 1991; Collins 2000). As Melanie Yazzie (Diné) and Cutcha Risling Baldy (Hupa, Yurok and Karuk) state (2018), decolonization must be built through expansive relations of care that shape Indigenous life, including those that are entangled with Black and anticolonial struggles for liberation (see also Yazzie 2019). Building on this, we are also guided by the work of Black feminist theorist Katherine McKittrick (2019), who compels us to theorize liberation broadly and comprehensively, by collectivizing the ideas and strategies activated across BIPOC communities, by doing this work with care and ethical accountability. We were fortunate to be in the audience when McKittrick gave her keynote talk “Living Just Enough for the City, Volume VI, Black Methodology,” delivered in September 2019 at the GenUrb: Feminist Explorations of Urban Futures conference in Toronto. In her talk, McKittrick theorizes Black methodologies of liberation and freedom in part by stressing the need to “read widely, deeply and think relationally” and urges Black and anticolonial scholars to learn from creative and interdisciplinary labor as we imagine and activate geographies of abolition and freedom. Inspired by McKittrick, and echoing her words, we seek to “theorize place as relation” by elucidating the ways of relating and living that work toward liberation. As she writes in Dear Science, “If we are committed to anticolonial thought, our starting point must be one of disobedient relationality that always questions, and thus is not beholden to, normative academic logics. This means our method-making may not necessarily take us where we want to go, but it will take us, as Glissant writes, to ‘an unknown that does not terrify’” (McKittrick 2021, 45, citing Glissant 1997, 9). It is this form of disobedient relationality that we seek to weave through our collaborations and the method we seek to employ in and beyond this piece.

As we write elsewhere (Daigle and Ramírez 2021), the weaving of liberatory intimacies builds solid foundations for abolitionist and decolonial work, through which “tiny territories” (Gilmore 2017, 227) of mutual aid can grow into constellations that hold vast political power across space (Simpson 2017). This transformative work starts at an embodied scale as mass movements cannot be built without the mutual recognition, trust, and accountability that arise from ethical intimacies: building interrelationships is coconstitutive to more visible forms of on-the-ground political organizing (Hunt and Holmes 2015). More than this, our theorizing of radical relationality is shaped by grounded experiences with collaborators, friends, and mentors over the years, including May Farrales (2019), Yolanda González Mendoza (chapter 3), Madeline Whetung (2019), Willie J. Wright (2020), Pavithra Vasudevan (2021), and Michael Fabris (2017). As Nishnaabeg theorist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson articulates, “The idea of thinking in formation, or thinking with . . . comes from Indigenous intellectual practices and is also parallel to the intellectual work and brilliance of Black feminist theorists” (2017, 37). Echoing Black feminist theorist Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Simpson proceeds to ask, “What does it mean to ‘prioritize being with each other, being with the work, being with the possibilities, more than [prioritizing] the gymnastics of trying to get it right in a structure built on wrongness’” (37). We follow Simpson and Gumbs here, as we seek to build a methodology of radical relationality while also seeking to avoid illusions of seamless relationship building across BIPOC communities. This work is fraught, complex, and at times painful, and we do not wish to reproduce or fall back on facile metaphors of shared or overlapping oppressions. Yet as Tiffany Lethabo King so brilliantly articulates in her preface to The Black Shoals, “I write to live with myself. Beyond keeping one up at night, a haunting can grant an inheritance. My inheritance is that, as a Black person living under relations of conquest, I care about Native peoples’ survival. . . . I care because the Black radical politics that I have inherited cares about Native people. . . . It is a Black radical politics that proceeds and moves toward Black and Indigenous futures” (2019, xiii). King’s reflections resonate with the relation that we have been building together and with others over the past several years: we write, think, and practice together out of a shared respect and care for each other’s lives as we live under relations of conquest. We practice from the genealogies we have inherited, and from this shared respect and care we have built a relation of accountability to each other and to those we are in dialogue with. We are invested in building liberatory futures with one another and our kin.

As we think through radical relationality here, we focus on the everyday practices and relationships that make us feel liberated and free, as brief as those moments might be, while simultaneously calling attention to the spaces in which our visions of freedom feel stifled by white possessive desires. We are intentional in what we choose to reveal in this piece and what is not divulged. While we do not intend to romanticize our relationship and dialogue as always easy, there seems to be a possessive desire for us to perform tensions and frictions that have emerged from our dialogue. While we refuse to do so in this piece, for any tensions we have had are not for academic consumption, we reiterate that it is through slow and intentional relationship building that we are able to engage with a humility and respect that enables us to anticipate and navigate any tensions that may emerge. From these moments and shared spaces of dialogue, we continue weaving pathways, routes/roots/rhizomes toward liberatory futures—this is our disobedient method.

In what follows, we draw from a conversation that was recorded in December 2018 for the Relational Poverty podcast series (Daigle and Ramírez 2019b). The intention of this chapter is to serve as an archive of these genealogies, drawing threads as we continue to weave, and collectively build a language and method of resistance and liberation. We begin by tracing the formations of our work on decolonial geographies of liberation, by recounting why and how our collaboration emerged. From there we discuss challenges and lessons we have learned along the way and how our thinking on liberation continues to take shape. In doing this, we reflect on whom we have been present with, have been thinking with, and continue to learn from. While we focus primarily on relationship building that began in academic settings, we hope that our conversation delineates how the roots of these relationships are always grounded in collaborators’ respective communal and familial ties and commitments. As such, we explore how we have strategically mobilized academic spaces for relationship building, while simultaneously reckoning with the limitations of doing this work within a complicit branch of the colonial state. We end by reflecting on what work needs to be done in our respective communities and how a major part of continuing to organize toward liberatory futures is about sharing space and stories and learning how to exist in reciprocal constellation. The method we are weaving here does not take the form of an explicit model that can be easily reproduced elsewhere—this method is slow and intentional and takes time, care, and love to build. We see this piece as an archive of what we have built in our collaborations and where we are hoping to travel and as an offering of our story as a methodological example of how to build anticolonial collaboration and kinship in and beyond the academy.

Formations

MICHELLE DAIGLE (MD): Magie and I met when we were PhD students in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington. I was returning to grad school after a couple of years of working in Indigenous communities in Coast Salish territory. After several years of being immersed within Indigenous community work, I suddenly felt disconnected from the knowledge and people who had informed my thinking and political commitments over the years.

I noticed the erasure of Indigenous knowledge in different ways: in the content and the scholarship that we were reading, but also in the collective consciousness that pervaded the academic community I had joined. For example, even though we were in a geography department, there wasn’t an acknowledgment of the place where we were living and working, the ancestral territories of the Duwamish nation. Those kinds of questions didn’t shape seminar conversations or come up in day-to-day conversations about colonial dispossession and what responsibilities and accountabilities we might have—not just in terms of thinking about relational geographies of dispossession and how that connects different places around the world—but also what our responsibilities and accountabilities are by living on stolen and occupied Indigenous territories.

This is something that I thought about quite a bit, and there were many moments when I felt like my experiences as an Indigenous woman, coming from a community that has lived through generations of colonial capitalist dispossession, weren’t centered, in many ways, within the discipline of geography. I was looking for other people to be in conversation with about these realities. This is when Magie and I started to share our concerns and to build a dialogue, as we drew on our respective experiences, including my upbringing in Cree territory in what’s now widely known as Treaty 9 in northern Ontario, and hers on Ohlone territories, now named the San Francisco Bay Area. As our dialogue and relationship grew, we could see the affinities that exist between our personal experiences, the research we do, and why we do it, our visions of liberation. Or, rather, I think our relationship grew from our shared affinities. We were learning from one another, from the genealogies of theory and political work that has activated our consciousness. We also challenged each other and continue to do so by asking each other questions that aren’t always easy to broach but that we’ve been able to do because of the relationships and trust building that we’ve built over the years.

MAGIE RAMÍREZ (MMR): Absolutely—our affinities and the overlaps we began to discover in the genealogies that fed us really brought us together. I started grad school in geography at the UW back in 2008, and being a first-generation graduate student I really had no idea what to expect. What I experienced in grad school was a profound culture shock that took me a long time to sort my way through. Just sitting in a grad seminar space—we all know the violences that happen in the seminar room—I was troubled by the fact that I didn’t see my communities’ perspectives reflected in what we were reading. And the ways that I did see them reflected were really exploitative and extractive. So I found myself, as many BIPOC students do, being the sole voice in the seminar room saying, “But what about race? But what about Indigeneity?” That sort of kneejerk reaction when we are struggling against systemic erasure, struggling so that our epistemologies are visible and valued.

Michelle started a few years after I got to the UW, and I remember sitting in a seminar with her for the first time in 2011 or 2012 and hearing her talk about decoloniality from an Indigenous perspective. At that point I was taking a course in gender and women’s studies with Michelle Habell-Pallán (2005) on Chicana feminist theory. This class was really influential for me because it gave me a language through which to understand a lot of things that I had lost from assimilation. I was exposed to writings on the borderlands, nepantla, and the decolonial imaginary, classic texts by Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), Emma Pérez (1999), Chela Sandoval (2000), Mary Pat Brady (2002), and other Chicana feminists. Reading these texts helped me to situate myself and my experience in theory, helped me to validate my own epistemologies. So when I heard Michelle talking about decolonization, I was thinking about it through the framework that I was really immersed in. Thinking about it from a Chicana feminist sense, thinking about the influence of the border on Mexican, Chicanx, and Latinx peoples—and how the border has created this severed sense of self, or severed positionality and consciousness, that is produced by the colonial nation-state but also carries within it this ability to build creative survival mechanisms that dispossessed peoples have to resist and survive the colonial structures that we live within (see also Herrera, chapter 5).

So when Michelle and I first started talking, I think at that point we were speaking different languages—we were using the same words but with different conceptualizations. This has been a critique of Chicana feminist theory as well, as Tuck and Yang (2012) have very precisely written, that decolonization is not a metaphor. When Michelle and I started having this dialogue, there was a reckoning for me for all the gaps in my own knowledge.

We began collaborating in 2014 when we started planning a session on decolonial geographies at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) meeting. We thought, well, we don’t really see anyone in geography talking about the decolonial. So let’s write a call for papers (CFP) and make something for AAGs and see what comes out of it. And we framed it as “Decolonization, Resistance and Resurgence: Enacting Alternative Geographies.” That was the first title. And we had a tremendous response from that CFP.

MD: Magie and I had spent time building a dialogue between each other— but really developing a friendship, discussing ideas, and developing the trust that was needed to have conversations on decolonization and liberation. We both had blind spots. There are also difficult points of contention that arise when you’re trying to grapple with what decolonization means collectively for BIPOC communities, given the divides that have been created between communities because of processes of colonization, and also through the divisiveness of particular fields in the academy, notably settler-colonial theory. Once we spent some time having these conversations and developing that trust, we decided to open it up and connect with other people who wanted to have these conversations from a grounded place.

Learnings

MD: Over the years, we’ve made particular commitments as we’ve sought to build dialogue on questions of decolonization and liberation. We’ve sought to center the perspectives and knowledge of BIPOC people, whose thinking is grounded in the life experiences and relationships they have with their respective communities. This became increasingly important for us after our first session at the AAG in Chicago, back in 2015. As Magie said, we received a tremendous response to the CFP. We met a number of brilliant people through this session, but there were also a number of presentations that we felt unsettled by, either because it wasn’t apparent to us whether some people had relationships with the communities they were presenting on or because there was an exploitative element to their research.

Over the years, Magie and I have seen how the decolonial has been taken up within geography and within academia in general. One of the concerns, or critiques, is that a lot of this work doesn’t actually seem to be grounded in respectful relationships or in relationships at all. In academia, decolonization can be framed in a rather abstract way, in a way that is disconnected from the knowledge and the people who embody anticolonial relationships and ways of being in the world. We don’t take this lightly. We understand that it takes many years of relationship building before we can speak or write about particular realities related to (de)colonization.

MMR: Absolutely. This has been something that we’ve been developing for many years, and it wasn’t until 2018 that we were actually able to sit down and start to cultivate a language—to begin to sit down and write together to think through what we mean when we say “decolonial geographies” (Daigle and Ramírez 2019a). So our intention isn’t to police academic spaces but to be intentional in our own work and in the spaces we cultivate to not reproduce colonial relations and methods of knowledge extraction. To us, it is essential that the relationships we build are respectful, intentional, and accountable. This work of building relations is slow, as it needs to be.

One of the things that happened after our first session, we were approached to be part of a publication. But we didn’t feel ready to be writing at that time, we didn’t feel we had a language yet, so we declined. And the person who invited us to the edited collection went on to publish some of the ideas, drawing directly from knowledge in Michelle’s presentation in particular. They published this piece without citing Michelle, or our session, and their work was careless, a very shallow read of Indigenous theorists that was using them as an accessorial citation more than anything. To us, this work is something that we are carrying in particular ways—it’s a practice, a methodology. And we feel this is the pace that the work needs to take. We needed to have these years of consistent dialogue and conversation to really build an understanding between and among each other—between Michelle and I, and between all of our collaborators with whom we’ve been so grateful to engage in conversation over the years. And I really feel like every time we have written these CFPs, and every time we’ve created spaces for this dialogue, we’ve deepened our understanding.

MD: At the same time that we’ve been building on conversations with each other, and with other collaborators, we’ve both been doing the work of learning what a decolonial and liberatory politics means to the communities that we’re connected to. For myself, my thinking is rooted within my nation, the Mushkegowuk nation. But increasingly, I’m also careful to acknowledge how Anishinaabe and Oji-Cree people in my community and family have informed my thinking. In other words, I’ve tried to be more careful about complicating rigid notions of Indigenous nationhood by thinking through the expansive kinship relationships that have cultivated my thinking on decolonization and liberation. Anishinaabe people migrated to Mushkegowuk territory. Many of them came, historically, to work in the fur trade, but they built relationships with Mushkegowuk people, and many of them remained there and became our kin and an integral part of our body politic. Even though I speak from a standpoint of being a Mushkegowuk woman, when I think of my relations, I want to acknowledge that I’ve also learned a lot from my Anishinaabe relatives as well. The kinship that exists between Mushkegowuk and Anishinaabe, including the tensions that were reproduced through colonial policy and interventions, has impacted my thinking on relationality—how political relationships and commitments build over time, how they are challenged yet defy colonial interventions, and the difficult and time-consuming work that goes into the relationship building that is part of Indigenous life.

So even though I use the language of the decolonial, when I think about what that actually means, I’m thinking of Mushkegowuk sociopolitical practices that are (re)building relationalities amid the ongoing conditions of colonial capitalism. I think of how generations of colonial violence have affected Indigenous life—which of course includes the assimilation policies that were implemented under the Indian Act; a long history of resource extraction, which is ongoing with mining developments that are being proposed; the systemic implementation of residential schools and the generations within my family and community that attended residential school; and also the heteronormative patriarchal assimilation policies that ruptured the leadership and the political and legal roles of Mushkegowuk and Anishinaabe women and queer and Two-Spirit people. Within this context, when I think of decolonization, I think of how Indigenous peoples can and are rebuilding our legal practices and kinship relations, and the ways that we care for one another on an everyday basis. This was my starting point when we started to build a conversation on decolonial geographies. More and more, where my thinking has gone—not that it’s left that, not that that is still not a priority for me—but that I’m thinking about how that comes, then, into relationship with Black, Latinx, and anticolonial understandings of colonization, racial capitalism, and resistance and liberation.

MMR: As Michelle was saying, the relationship—we have focused particularly on BIPOC communities, and how processes of colonialism and racial capitalism have affected us in distinct ways. And that’s what this relational reckoning is about—we all make meaning of the world based on our own epistemologies, our own lived experiences, the issues that are most pertinent to our communities. So in our cultivation of decolonial geographies, there is a reckoning, as Tuck and Yang (2012, 7) theorize, there are “contradictory decolonial desires” among differently marginalized peoples. And so part of this process that Michelle and I have undergone is trying to pay attention to how, within our communities, there are colonial residues that have caused us to both isolate ourselves from other communities and at times place blame.

So part of how we’ve developed this dialogue is also around the reckoning that needs to take place within our communities. In my case, how do non-Indigenous and non-Black Latinx peoples address the deeply entrenched racisms of anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity that exist in our communities, as well as the ways that Latinidad as a hegemonic project appropriates and marginalizes Blackness and Indigeneity, and how these erasures and appropriations continue to sideline Afro-Latinx and Indigenous-Latinx experiences? These are really pertinent issues that Latinx peoples need to talk about more. Related to this, how can those of us who are settlers live in better relation to those whose land we reside upon? I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area with little awareness of whose land I was on, and it wasn’t until the past few years that I’ve learned more about the Ohlone geographies of the Bay and how I as a Chicana settler born and raised on these territories could live in better reciprocity. The language that Michelle and I have been building is how to respectfully engage in these conversations, knowing that we are not always going to fully understand each other. We’re going to make mistakes, and yet we continue building and learning because we are invested in one another’s liberation.

These conversations have been one of the most fruitful exchanges that I’ve had in academic spaces. They have gotten me to think not only about how this informs my scholarship but also about how it shapes my accountability to people in the places that I am from and the places that I visit. We talk about how there is no language for this work—we’re building the bridge as we walk across it. Like Anzaldúa wrote, “Caminiante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar” (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983, v). And so there’s something really humbling about this act of building as we walk—we feel like we are trying to cultivate something that is still in formation.

MD: To build off of what you said Magie, there has also been an erasure of anti-Blackness and other forms of racial dispossession and violence in Indigenous studies and communities. Something that resonated with me in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s book, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (2017), is her chapter on “constellations of co-resistance.” Her thinking in this chapter resonates with a lot of what we’ve been discussing over the years and what we’ve also learned from other people whom we’ve connected with, like May Farrales (2019), who works with the Filipinx community in Vancouver and more generally within so-called British Columbia. She has sought to work with her community to ask what it means to be living on stolen and occupied Indigenous lands. And what might our responsibilities and accountabilities be, even though many people from our community are here through various forms of racial dispossession as well?

One thing that resonated with me about Simpson’s writing on constellations of co-resistance is that she opens up the chapter by asking, what happens when Indigenous resurgence risks—and I’m quoting her here—“replicating anti-Blackness without solid reciprocal relationships with Black visionaries who are also co-creating alternatives under the lens of the abolition decolonization and anti-capitalism” (2017, 229). As an Indigenous person, these conversations are not always easy to have within our own communities because of the divides and erasures that have been reproduced through colonial schemas, the blame placing that you referred to Magie, that happens within our own communities. I think that one of the challenges is also that there is so much work, relationship building and accountability building, that needs to happen across Indigenous communities and nations. It can become difficult to envision anything bigger than this at times, when you start thinking about these on-the-ground realities, and the concerns and challenges that are articulated by our relatives. It can be difficult to articulate the importance of building relationships with other BIPOC communities to people within our families and communities. But, having said that, I do think that more and more people are open to having these conversations and thinking critically about what our own political organizing means if it comes into relationship with other communities and political organizing led by Black people and people of color.

Simpson’s work has been influential in both of our thinking. As Magie said, we drew on the idea of constellations in the piece that we wrote on decolonial geographies (Daigle and Ramírez 2019a). Due to the appropriation of Indigenous knowledge within the academy—and also how the decolonial has been appropriated within geography and in other disciplines—we hesitated in drawing on Simpson’s scholarship.

Magie and I had a conversation about whether we should use the framework of constellations and what it means for us. As Simpson says, she wants people, her readers, and particularly Indigenous readers, to figure out how we can contextualize what we’re learning from her work within the context of our own nation’s knowledge so that we’re not just drawing on how she’s come to theorize resurgence or constellations of co-resistance from a Nishnaabeg perspective. If we see something in that and it speaks to us, then we have to do the work of relationship building and learning within the communities that we come from. I think that’s something that we’re both trying to do, right?

MMR: Absolutely. And as you said, the writing that we’ve been working on recently in thinking about how we theorize decolonial geographies, we definitely got a lot of inspiration not only from Indigenous feminist writings, like Simpson’s, but also from Clyde Woods’s (2017) and Katherine McKittrick’s (2006) theorization of Black geographies. Their theorizations have been a tremendous source of inspiration in thinking about how we develop these theories, thinking about differential productions of space, drawing from Black studies, Black feminism, and the Black Radical Tradition. And also really trying to begin threading a conversation between decolonization and abolition, which is something that we tried to do in that piece (Daigle and Ramírez 2019a). And how do, not only people, but how do these movements function in constellation? How are they simultaneously working on particular issues, working toward the abolition of the carceral state, the carceral system, and the repatriation of Indigenous territories, and how are these movements working toward collective liberation? How are these movements seeking a similar future, and how can these movements work in constellation to envision futures for all of our communities, to move beyond the colonial racial-capitalist system?

MD: Yes, and I sometimes worry that when we talk about liberation or resurgence, that some people will think only about larger social movements like Idle No More or Standing Rock or Black Lives Matter and so on. Don’t get me wrong—it’s not that these movements are not incredibly important in activating liberatory politics. Rather, I worry about how other forms of political practices become invisibilized. In my work, I’ve tried to emphasize how more visible or larger forms of Indigenous activism cannot happen without the day-to-day work that occurs at the community level in different ways. This is something that Indigenous feminists and queer and Two-Spirit scholars and activists have foregrounded in their work and that I’ve also learned from Black and Latinx feminists as well, such as Katherine McKittrick (2011) and Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s (2017) thinking. I’ve been thinking more about the affinities that exist between Black, Indigenous, and Latinx feminist theorizations of freedom and liberation.

To go back to what you were reflecting on, it made me think, we haven’t really talked too much about the whiteness that can be embedded within conversations on solidarity building. One of the problems is that a lot of the scholarship on settler colonialism has been dominated by white scholars who tend to recenter whiteness within their conversations on settler colonialism but also on solidarity building. A great deal of settler-colonial theory has erased earlier scholarship by Indigenous scholars, who were actually talking about the same kind of processes of elimination and of settlement but maybe didn’t necessarily use the language of settler colonialism.

I was on the panel that you mentioned that we organized in New Orleans in 2018 on “Geographies of Land/Liberation” with Willie Wright. I remember we had a series of reflections that were shared by a number of panelists, including Willie Wright (2020), Melanie Yazzie (2015), May Farrales (2019), and Yolanda Valencia (2017). There was a lot that resonated with me, and I found it incredibly meaningful to have that group of people sitting together to discuss what liberation means from our respective positionalities and the communities that we come from, while also trying to reckon with how our visions come into relationship with one another. After we all shared, we opened up the space for a Q&A, and there was this unsettling silence that took over in the room. Magie, as we reflected about that afterward, I shared how I wanted to engage with ideas that some people on the panel had shared, but I knew that some of these points might feel a bit more difficult and perhaps contentious—and I also felt the gaze, I felt a white gaze, a colonial gaze, that still pervades the academy, and I hesitated in that moment to have those conversations in that space.

From there we had a discussion on what spaces are appropriate to have these kinds of conversations. Is a big venue like the AAG, an academic conference, the appropriate place to have this? Or do we need more private spaces to cultivate these conversations, similar to those we have within our own communities, where we’re able to have conversations among one another without feeling like we’re on display for other people in this academic space that is still very much embedded in a gaze that I still feel as an Indigenous scholar.

MMR: Yeah, that AAG session was a big learning moment, for me, definitely. I remember that same silence after everyone spoke these profound and really just powerful testimonies. The silence that followed, and like Michelle said, the gaze of the room, I felt a paralysis come over me. I went into that panel really wanting to hold space more than anything, which is why I decided not to be on the panel itself. And I think I realized, as Michelle said, that maybe that wasn’t the space where we were meant to have these exchanges. The intense gaze of the audience felt very colonial, very extractive. And the density of the silence really started to consume me in that moment. We didn’t know who was in that room—there were so many people, and it felt like we were putting the colonial ghosts on display without ensuring that there was going to be some accountability from those who were there to witness it. Maybe we were overly ambitious to try to have that conversation at AAGs. These are really fraught histories and geographies that we are trying to engage with, and the five of you were bringing knowledge to the table that needed to be honored. It was a very vulnerable space. And it’s not really fair to open up things that can be very vulnerable and very difficult to process and articulate in that sort of setting.

I remain proud of how we cultivated that session, the five of you on that panel were really incredible. But I think that the deafening silence of the room, the density of the space after words were spoken, that was a moment that really affected me. In the aftermath of that session, I realized that maybe we needed to take a step back. And, in a sense, in the same way that we’ve been talking about how we’ve been really intentional in the pace of how we’ve engaged this dialogue over the years, maybe that was too big of a step to make in this public setting. The fact that it was the first time that some of the panelists were meeting each other, and to be engaging in this conversation in such a public manner—it was a learning moment for me.

MD: I think that goes to show you in many ways how this is not just an academic exercise for a lot of us who are having these conversations. We’re not just there to perform our expertise on what we think the decolonial is. I see the work that I’m doing as a scholar as an extension of what I see as the larger work that needs to be done within my community. In many ways, my role within the academy is to strategically, use whatever resources or the privileges that we do have as scholars—to put that toward processes that actually matter within community. I think that’s partly what shaped how the panel unfolded that day too. It’s so much more difficult to have a humble dialogue about decolonization and liberation when you’re thinking about what this looks like in real life, where we go from here, and how we embody a relational politics on a day-to-day basis. It’s not easy.

MMR: Yes, definitely. I think that’s ultimately what has brought you and I together, Michelle—that we’re not just writing this because of pressure to publish. We are invested in these conversations—what they represent and how they take shape in an academic sense is part of it, but I think ultimately we’re trying to build something bigger than that. It really is a form of praxis.

MD: Some of that praxis might be more visible within different academic spaces or forums. And then, I think that some of it, inevitably, is not going to be visible, and it’s not supposed to be either. Right?

MMR: Yes—it’s not for consumption.

The remainder of our conversation reflected on the importance of relational accountability. By drawing on our respective experiences in the North American context, we emphasized the importance of situating accountability with the Indigenous peoples, lands, and waters that we live and work on. We discussed how this framing of accountability serves as a starting point for everyone to think about ethical and responsible relationship building. We also stressed how some Indigenous peoples have sought to build dialogue within their own communities and nations, about what it might mean to welcome people into our territories according to our own political practices and law. Indeed, these are governance practices that have always continued throughout Indigenous nations, in spite of colonization, and which Indigenous peoples continue to activate as they simultaneously recognize the colonial and racial violence that have led other BIPOC peoples to be living on their ancestral territories or to have traveled to them to be in solidarity with shared struggles for land and bodily sovereignty.

Futures

The aforementioned AAG session on “Geographies of Land/Liberation” in New Orleans was a crucial learning moment for us. As Michelle recounts, she felt stifled by the gaze in the room during the Q&A portion of the session. In that moment, she made a conscious decision to not ask questions to her fellow panelists and to not probe on particular points of tension and of possible emergence. Magie, as the “chair” of the session, struggled with the performative aspect of having these intimate conversations on display and felt paralyzed by her inability to fully honor everything that was shared and navigate the role of the “audience” present. This moment, for both of us, changed the nature of doing this work and led to multiple conversations between fellow panelists and other collaborators who were in the room that day. These conversations specifically centered on the importance of continuing dialogue and relationship building, by bringing some of this work into private spaces. We discussed our frustration and concerns with white academics appropriating BIPOC theory and labor for careerist objectives, particularly when their “survey of the field”– type literature reviews are what ends up getting high “h-index” valorizations. We feel that the need to bring this work underground is also so that we can focus on building relationships between one another without having to continually mitigate a white possessive gaze that we find to dominate many academic spaces.³ As Katherine McKittrick writes, “The story asks that we live with the difficult and frustrating ways of knowing differentially. (And some things we can keep to ourselves. They cannot have everything)” (2021, 7). More importantly, we discussed desires to create spaces where BIPOC people can come together to share ideas and strategies, where we can envision geographies of liberation, without those visions being taken up for public consumption.

Pursuits for liberation require refusals of anti-Blackness and colonial genocide, including the ways that BIPOC people resist the fetishization of trauma-based narratives and how and to whom we choose to disclose the challenges, tensions, and underlying desires of our work. At moments, freedom work must be covert and opaque (Glissant 1997; Simpson 2017; King 2019). In writing this piece, we constantly returned to these core values as we considered what to share and what not to share, as we understand our methodology to be one that is accountable to relations that are in formation, in constant renewal, built on shared practices of storytelling, healing, and organizing for our futures. The fraughtness of weaving different genealogies of decolonial thinking together further affirms the need for closed spaces that support exploratory thinking and critical generosity. At the same time, we remain hopeful of the generative potential of future public conversations and forums. Specifically, we hope to cultivate more spaces in which decolonial thinkers, including grassroots activists and artists, can share their community-based work alongside each other, to work against the silos that are reproduced through colonial disciplinary logics and practices.

Our collaboration has simultaneously led us to return to our respective work on Indigenous, Black, and Latinx liberation with renewed political commitments to the people we have learned from throughout the past several years. In doing this, we recognize the relationship building that needs to happen within each of these communities and remain committed to this resurgent and liberatory work. Alongside this, we continue to go back to our community-based work with renewed understandings of how our freedoms are contingent upon one another. For myself (Michelle), I continue to be unsettled with the ways particular framings of Indigenous sovereignty and land reclamation foreclose dialogue and relationship building with anticolonial relations, and reproduce anti-Blackness within Indigenous studies and communities. As I have previously reflected (see Attewell et al. 2018), I am particularly concerned with how settler-colonial theory reifies a land/labor binary that risks creating divisions between Indigenous and Black peoples. As Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca) articulates (2008), Indigenous space can be flattened to colonial renderings of territory that preclude relationality across Indigenous communities, but also with Black and POC relations. As Tiffany Lethabo King brilliantly articulates, Black and Indigenous peoples must build “a new grammar [that] emerge[s] at the shoals of Black and Native porous futures” (King 2019, 151). Drawing on King, I am guided by a desire for new modes of humanism that are made possible as BIPOC feminist and queer thinkers generously and humbly meet one another and become open to being shaped through our distinct yet interconnected struggles for freedom. Increasingly, I am compelled to think through the expansiveness of what it means to be Mushkegowuk, specifically how Mushkegowuk life is shaped not only through our roots in the muskegs but through our movement throughout space and time, and the relations we encounter, and who shape us in transformative ways.

As for me (Magie), I am grateful that I now have Latinx colleagues in geography with whom I can grapple with many of the issues taking place in our communities that necessarily need to be addressed. As I mentioned earlier in this text, the anti-Black and anti-Indigenous discourses that are far too common in mestizx communities need to be challenged, both in how we internalize these colonial racisms and in how we reproduce them. Pushing back against these discourses as they emerge around the dinner table with our parents, siblings, and other kin is a necessary part of anticolonial work. Despite the fact that my initial engagement in decolonial theory stemmed from Chicana feminist theorists (Anzaldúa 1987; Pérez 1999), I have found myself straying from the central analytics of these literatures. I am uncertain if the borderlands, nepantla, Aztlán, the third space, and the decolonial imaginary can offer liberatory analytics without reproducing Indigenous erasures and appropriations, as well as anti-Blackness (Cahuas 2019). Therefore, as a white Chicana, I am invested in centering the theorizations of Black and Indigenous Latinx peoples so that mestizaje does not continue to be presumed in conversations of Latinx identity, and so that anti-Black and anti-Indigenous linguistic and cultural practices do not continue to uphold the racisms that scaffold mestizaje as a white-supremacist racial project. It is my work to further explore these contentions and erasures in and beyond Latinx geographies with other Latinx peoples, and I believe that it is through reading Black and Indigenous thought, and respectful listening, laughing, and learning together, that we can begin to disentangle these relations. Perhaps we need to betray Latinidad so as to combat the toxic racisms many Latinx peoples have inherited. And to make sure Afro-Latinx, Indigenous Latinx, queer and trans Latinx peoples are at the forefront of our conversations, for I believe this is where we will build antiracist, antipatriarchal, anticolonial Latinx geographies that exist in relation, or in constellation, with Black and Indigenous geographies.

As we continue to collectively weave pathways toward liberation, we are inspired by anticolonial thinkers such as Nick Estes (citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe) (2019), Robyn Maynard (2017), and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017), who ground their theorizations of Indigenous and Black liberation within the roots and routes that give rise to their desires for freedom, while also attending to how their genealogies and lives are intimately entangled with those of other BIPOC communities around the globe. We are also guided by examples of anticolonial thinkers coming together to share stories and collaboratively envision collective liberation (Tuck and Walcott 2017; Simpson and Maynard 2018; Simpson and Brand 2018), while also being deeply thankful and invigorated by brilliant theorists such as Tiffany Lethabo King (2019) who are tracing the entanglements of anti-Blackness, Indigenous genocide, and white supremacy as well as the deep histories and interactions that have always enlivened radical relationality across BIPOC communities. We are energized by these writings and the conversations and relationships that continue to emerge. It is through continued conversation and the sharing of space, food, song, and story that we find constellations of radical relationality emerging. While the act of engaging in slow, private, and intentional exchanges may seem simple, we find that it is a necessary part of finding roots, routes, and rhizomes (Glissant 1997) toward liberatory futures, and, following Glissant’s words from the epigraph, a valuable piece of moving beyond frameworks of opposition and into relation.

NOTES

1. We draw on the framing of “Brown” from José Esteban Muñoz’s posthumous text Sense of Brown (2020) to signal shared experiences of colonial violence across the Global South, well aware of the imperfection of the term. Brown, Muñoz writes, because “the world is and has been brown and has been so despite the various blockages that keep us from knowing or being attuned to brownness. This is to argue that lives are still organized and disorganized by harsh asymmetries that systemically devalue classes of singularities . . . a brown commons [is] . . . not only a shared indignation but also a process of thinking and imagining otherwise in the face of shared wounding” (5–6).

2. We draw on Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s (2017) theorization of flight and constellations in this piece, the latter of which we reference below. Simpson anchors her thinking on constellations within Nishinaabeg cosmologies and draws on Cree media maker and writer Jarrett Martineau’s (2015) work on affirmative refusal as well as on Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s (2013) work on fugitivity to reflect on how constellations of co-resistance provide a flight “out of settler colonial realities into Indigeneity” (Simpson 2017, 217). As we have previously written (Daigle and Ramírez 2019b), Simpson centers relationship building between Indigenous and Black communities and asks Indigenous peoples whom we should be in constellation with in our pursuits for freedom. She cautions that Indigenous resurgence risks “replicating anti-Blackness without solid, reciprocal relationships with Black visionaries who are also co-creating alternatives under the lens of abolition, decolonization, and anti-capitalism” (Simpson 2017, 228–229).

3. We draw this from George Lipsitz’s writings on “the possessive investment in whiteness” (1995). While Lipsitz’s work addresses how white supremacy functions in society writ large, we have occasionally encountered an insatiable desire of white academics to consume BIPOC theories and experiences, to the extent that at times white academics demand entry, demand the right to be a part of (or at least to witness) our conversations. We refuse this possessive gaze, refuse to cater to these colonial desires to consume our stories.

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