Transcript - "#BLACKLIVESMATTER and Indigenous Resistance: Thinking through Intersectional Movements"
September 17, 2020 -- Radical Kinship Series
Listen to "#BLACKLIVESMATTER and Indigenous Resistance: Thinking through Intersectional Movements".
LETI VOLPP: Good afternoon, and welcome to our event. “#BlackLivesMatter and Indigenous Resistance-- Thinking Through Intersectional Movements.
My name is Leti Volpp, and I'm the Director of the Center for Race and Gender here at UC Berkeley. We're thrilled you can be with us today for this exciting event.
Before I introduce the moderator and curator of today's event, let me just mention
two additional upcoming events we're presenting that you may find of interest. On October 1, a Thursday forum on Restoring Rights, Returning Ancestors, and Building Relationships with Lauren Kroiz and Megon Noble. And on October 22, our Distinguished Guest Lecture with Angela Davis and Gina Dent who will speak bout Abolition Feminism.Let me now introduce the fabulous organizer of the Radical Kinship Series and the moderator of today's event, Alan Pelaez Lopez.
Alan is an Afro Zapotec artist and scholar from Oaxaca, Mexico. They are the author of
“Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien” published by the Operating System in 2020, which was a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award, as well as the volume “To Love and Mourn in the Age of Displacement” published by Nomadic Press in 2020.
Thank you.
And I will now turn it over to Alan.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you so much, Leti. I am so excited to be introducing Amber and Ashley today.
I hope they didn't hear the ringing.
And before I introduce them, I want to start with a land acknowledgment, even though we are not on the university campus.
And University of California, Berkeley sits on the territory of Huichin, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo, Ohlone, the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Ohlone people. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land since the institution's founding in 1868. We have our responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the university's relationship to Native peoples. By offering this land acknowledgment, we want to affirm Indigenous sovereignty and name, that we will work to hold the University of California, Berkeley more accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous people.
My name is Alan. And as Leti mentioned, I am a Black Zapotec scholar.
And today's event brings two public thinkers, organizers, and kin, who I deeply respect. I met both of them on the internet first. For me, being a Black Indigenous person has been a lonely experience, and the internet has been a place of radical kinship and possibility. And with this said, I want to introduce you to Amber Starks and Ashley Ngozi Agbasoga.
So Amber Starks, also known as Melanin Mvskoke on social media is a Black Muscogee citizen whose tweets and Instagram art encourage Black and Indigenous peoples to prioritize one another and divest from compartmentalizing our struggles. This feels very simple to say. So let me tell you that Amber's work models accountability that interrupts settler violence and settler logic by naming intracommunity rupture so that we can all look towards the self.
And Ashley Ngozi Agbasoga is an Igbo and Choctaw Freedmen descendant whose work illuminates how Black, Indigenous, and Black/Afro-Indigenous women engage in placemaking practices that reveal and unsettle notions of race, place, and modern state formation in Mexico.
In a pre-planning conversation, Ashley pushed us to think of Black indigeneities, not only in the Americas, but in the larger Black Diaspora and also pushed us to think of the unnamed indigeneities of African Diaspora people in the US who are often left out of conversations on indigeneity. And I also want to uplift that a lot of the thinking of this conversation came from just our online friendship, the three of us, but also our desire to be in a space that doesn't center settler sympathy or any type of desire for citizenship, but a dialogue to be with each other.
So with that, I want to start the first question by asking Amber if you would tell us a little bit about how you came into your voice for yourself but also in your public entity as a text-based artist, a cultural critic, and how you're giving yourself permission to do that work.
And Ashley, if you will also let us know about how you came into vocalizing both your relationships with your Igbo indigeneity that is always already Black and your indigeneity through the Choctaw Freedmen people who also is always already Black.
Whoever wants to start first.
AMBER STARKS: [SPEAKING in Mvskoke (CREEK)] I think I'll go first.
[SPEAKING in Mvskoke (CREEK)]
Hi, my name is Amber. I also go by Melanie Mvskoke as Alan said. I am a Muscogee Creek citizen, and I'm also of Shawnee, Yuchi, Quapaw, and Cherokee descent.
And I always like to bring those ancestors into the spaces with me because I am them, and they are me. And I'm very much proud to be of their lineage, of their blood. And I try to think of them as living within me. And I think in answering your question, Alan.
I feel like I'm still coming into my own voice. I'm still finding courage and I'm still navigating what it means to be brave to speak to Afro Indigeneity and to exist in this space that where I can be equally Black and equally Native at the same time, no matter if I'm just with Black folks or just with Indigenous folks, but I feel like I'm still in that process of coming into my voice.
I don't think I have arrived or I don't know if I'm planning to arrive. I just want to be in it, you know.
So I think originally, I don't know that I had plans to, but maybe the universe or the ancestors are like, sorry, this is what you're doing. But I think my intention at first was just to kind of be
in the background online and like you said, trying to find community and kinship with other Afro Indigenous, Black, and Native, however folks are identifying, just trying to find community there and community in the Muscogee's online community.
So I think originally, I was hiding. And maybe that's something that I've been doing most of my life because I didn't know that I had permission to exist in spaces as a Black and Indigenous woman. And I think even as a child, I remember my dad telling me, you're Muscogee. And I'm like, OK. But didn't really know what that meant. And I didn't have access to people in my life who could reaffirm that and show me culturally what that meant.
And so I think there were times where I would fill out an application as I got older, and there's that race box. And I would always look over to the Native one and be like, I think. And sometimes I would check it. I would just get brave enough to check it.
But I think it's taken me over within the last five years really owning that. And a lot of that had to do with my dad passing and the Muscogee Creek Nation really coming through for us and supporting us through that process.
And I think that's the first time I've felt like I belonged to them. They cared about us, cared about my mom, made sure she had money for the wake. And I think that made me feel like I belonged. And so I think I developed this sense of bravery to be like, whoa, this is who I really am.
And so I think that has evolved into me, like I said, being online and just looking for kinship and looking at ways to express and own what has always been there, right?
I've always been Muscogee. I've always been Black and Native. I've always been Shawnee, Yuchi, Quapaw, Cherokee. But to thrive in that and to be bold in that is-- took a different-- I don't know, it just took another level of self-acceptance.
And when think about it, part of me is really sad that it took this long. And I feel like that is
a common narrative that I hear from other Afro-Indigenous folks, is you just kind of don't know that it's OK. And I think a lot of that has to do with the institutions that we exist in within the settler state and within white supremacy, and all that stuff. And so learning to exist outside of white supremacy and our oppression has helped me, in a lot of ways, take ownership of what was already mine, of my inheritance, and given me permission to access my ancestors, all those things.
So I think then developing my own voice, making my little memes or-- at first, just a way of talking to myself, telling myself this is OK. And maybe it was also my way of reaching out to other Black Natives, Afro-Indigenous folks, and saying "I see you".
Because I think a lot of times, we don't hear "I see you". And I try really hard when I'm speaking to other Black Native folks or just Native folks, being like, I see you. So I think that that's how I have started to develop my voice. But again, a lot of this is just me trying to be brave and me trying to feel like I have authority to speak to this, giving myself permission daily to exist and speak to this without needing some kind of approval from non-Black Native folks or just non-Black folks in general.
So yeah.
ASHLEY NGOZI AGBASOGA: Thank you for that, Amber.
There was a moment-- once again, just to let the audience know, we met a few days ago to meet each other virtually, and stuff like that. And I started tearing up then. And now, today, I started tearing up a little bit because it really brings to the fore to me what does it mean to reconnect with community and can be on, just like blood relations, I think.
And for me, that has been really important in part because my father is from what is now Nigeria,
[COMPUTER DING]
Southern Nigeria. He's Igbo. And my mother is from the--not the town, the state that is known as Mississippi, which is unceded Choctaw, Chickasaw land, and so many other nations. And I am a descendant of Choctaw Freedmen through my grandfather. But I am much more disconnected from that. I'm not a citizen. I'm much more connected to my father whose entire family is still in Nigeria and our ancestral village.
And so for me, I think the question of, one, can I even identify as a Black Native or Black Indigenous person, I've kind of been struggling with most of my life.
And what kind of indigeneity does indigeneity necessarily pertain to only the Americans, or is it a more global thing, and why is indigeneity displaced from Black people has been at the center of the work that I do, both in my scholarly life and in organizing. And so I think I didn't come into this either until I was an adult and learning things that had been kept away, in a sense.
And I think thinking through these things and having conversations with folks on the internet, as I've met Amber and Alan before, through that and other folks in college. One of my closest friends, Keisha, we talk all the time about what does it mean to be Black Indigenous. And then that comes up in my work with folks in the land known as Mexico, who identify and take up a Black Indigenous politic to what they do for their communities.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you for sharing.
I think that one of the things that has definitely, I guess, in a virtual space, brought us closer has been living in this moment, the outbreaks, of the Black Lives Matter movement, the riots, I mean. But also the amount of mourning that we're doing, particularly because of femicides. And I think that the Indigenous community in the US and-- considering how the US and Canada have really brought to light the missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, Two Spirits people's crisis.
And I'm wondering, the three of us are directly impacted by the global circle of anti-Black violence and by femicides, both the two of you for being gendered by society as women, whatever that may mean and then for me for being on the trans spectrum.
I'm kind of wondering how you are making sense of being alive in this moment and relating to Black folk, Indigenous folk, and queer and trans folk who may not necessarily understand what it means to live in these particular intersections.
What are the possibilities, the limits, the ruptures?
AMBER STARKS: (LAUGHS) Wow. I feel like I should have read before I started.
ASHLEY NGOZI AGBASOGA: [DISTORTED AUDIO] Yes, you can. (LAUGHING)
AMBER STARKS: Ashley, I tag you to hit that one first.
ASHLEY NGOZI AGBASOGA: I would actually like Alan to restate. If you could restate the last part of your question.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Yeah, so if you can speak to the limits and possibilities of relating to other people in community who are Black, or who are Indigenous, or who are women, queer, and trans, who may not necessarily understand the intersections that we live.
What are some of the limits? But what are also some of the possibilities of those relationships?
ASHLEY NGOZI AGBASOGA: [DISTORTED AUDIO] All right. I'll go first.
[DISTORTED AUDIO]
AMBER STARKS: Should I go until the internet kind of picks up?
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Yes, please.
AMBER STARKS: OK, so I think that. I'm always kind of--
ASHLEY NGOZI AGBASOGA: [DISTORTED AUDIO] I feel like we can have--
AMBER STARKS: So I want to say that in a lot of ways, my frame has matured during this time where we're all in quarantine and we're all faced with ourselves. And I think in a lot of ways, intersectionality has become part of my frame in a way that maybe I didn't have the language for prior to this.
Maybe I didn't have an academic understanding of intersectionality and how that plays into white supremacy and settler colonialism.
But reading a lot of Black feminism, I'm reading trans and LGBTQ stories from people who are not necessarily in the academic or in academia, have in a lot of ways informed my ideas around dismantling settler colonialism and white supremacy.
And when we speak to that, I think we have to really be honest that the most marginalized amongst us are the ones that we should be fighting for because that frees us all, right?
So as an Afro-Indigenous, slash, woman, my oppression looks a certain way. But my Black trans Afro-Indigenous counterpart, that intersectionality is not something that I necessarily-- I may not necessarily have to navigate. And so I think that the possibilities exist when we realize our common oppressor. When we realize how much more powerful and how much more radical we are working together.
So I think that in a lot of ways, I've learned to pull my frame back. And not just fighting for myself, like when I'm fighting for myself. When I'm speaking to issues, how does this affect the most marginalized amongst us?
And so I think the possibilities are that having an understanding that we need each other, that we need community-- like I said, I feel like I've gained so much from being online. And getting to know all of you online, I feel like, in a lot of ways, that's empowered me. And so I think that the possibilities of working together, understanding one another, listening to one another creates a kinship, and it creates a sense of power that we may not have on our own, just speaking to our own issues.
I think limitations are really hard, especially now in being still kind of semi-quarantine. I think activism is happening a lot more online than in person, which I think when it comes to dismantling systems, being in each other's presence is a really important thing, not just digitally.
And so I think right now, not having access to one another physically is creates this kind of a limitation.
But I want to say that even in that, it pushes us to start doing things in ourselves, like being at home, like I said reading more.
And I mean, I've never done any done any panels. So think I've been on-- I don't know, it feels like 15 panels since we started, which I'm so grateful for. And it's totally made me mature. And like I said, it's challenged my own thinking.
But I realize sometimes we are just so blinded by what we're dealing with that we don't realize there are our relatives who are dealing with some stuff that we have no idea. And if we're not fighting for them too, I think we then have to question how we're participating in their oppression and how we're participating in perpetuating the settler state, and patriarchy, and white supremacy, and all those other horrible intersections.
ASHLEY NGOZI AGBASOGA: Can you all hear me now?
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Yes.
ASHLEY NGOZI AGBASOGA: Anyone? Can you all hear me?
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Yes.
ASHLEY NGOZI AGBASOGA: Yes, oh my gosh, OK. Sorry, my internet is going in and out.
All right, Amber thank you. Thank you for your answer.
I mean, I'm thinking what are the ways in which we can relate to one another and find common ground in relating to one another. And one way that organizing and the youth now are showing us is that how to think outside of, say, the bounds of the nation or the state, right. There's always this kind of trap that we fall into when we adhere to the logics of the state, to appeal to, say, citizenship, et cetera.
That is oftentimes built to not include us. And so what I've been seeing, especially now in 2020, are ways in which folks-- although, of course, this has been done forever, is Black and Indigenous, Black Indigenous, and folks affected by white supremacy are imagining otherwise world outside of the state, doing things that are community-centered instead of inclusion-centered and whatnot.
And I think that's where my hope lies. Because sometimes-- I will say, sometimes I am a cynic. And I'm like, oh, it looks at this moment solidarity is a myth or it's not going to happen. But I think there are glimmers of hope that keep all of us going.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you, Ashley.
I think that your answer reminds me of something that you and I have talked about, as far as solidarity and community-centered work. Last year, Carmela Parral Santos, who was the alcaldesa, like the mayor of an Afro-Indigenous municipality in Oaxaca, was murdered after going against the state and saying no to the construction of the Maya Train, which would pretty much undo the lands of 13 Indigenous towns, Indigenous peoples.
And she was murdered by the state. And I know, Ashley, that you knew Carmela Parral Santos. And I didn't know Carmela Parral Santos, but I was in contact with her community, via the internet, the day she was murdered and the days following her murder. And when you're talking about community center versus inclusive center, that's I think at the root of Carmela's vision. As somebody in an Afro-Indigenous geography, all they had was each other. Black Indigenous people didn't have the option to opt out of either of those two categories.
And I'm wondering if you can speak to the ways in which identifying as Black and Indigenous in a settler state interrupts the project of settler colonialism and also opens up an alternative future.
ASHLEY NGOZI AGBASOGA: Absolutely.
So just for background for everyone, I'm currently a PhD candidate at Northwestern University. I'm in a predoctoral fellow at the Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. And my dissertation basically is thinking through how Mexico, which I and many others will now articulate as a settler geography or settler territory, uses mestizaje to regenerate its territory and racialize its geography. And the second half of the dissertation kind of looks at how Black Indigenous and Black Indigenous women's collectives, primarily in the Costa Chica, which is in the Southwest, which is the region that Alan has mentioned, as well as Mexico City, kind think of ways to think as us outside of the state and give to community.
So yes, the person that Alan had mentioned Carmela Parral Santos was executed last year on the main highway in the Costa Chica. And she was an activist and like many activists that are a threat are murdered. We see this throughout the hemisphere, not just Latin America, but some others that have recently been executed, have been, for instance, Bertha Caceres, or the five Garifuna men who are still disappeared, as we speak, about a month and a half ago.
These communities, I think, have not necessarily been on the periphery, I don't like that language, but instead have been outside of the nation. So in Mexico, the Mexican Senate voted unanimously to finally recognize its Black population for the first time. In 2015, there was an intercensal survey. In 2020 was the actual survey because Mexico also does a census every 10 years, in which it recognized Black or Afro descendientes on their census. But people have been living Black and Indigenous and Black Indigenous lives together for centuries since the 1500s.
We see the Black town of Nyanga, which was actually the first maroon town that in many ways was Black and Indigenous folks today out of Mexico's 1.4 million afrodescendientes. And estimates are that there are many, many more. These are probably just Mexican nationals. A good fifth of them also speak an Indigenous language. And that doesn't include those who do not speak an Indigenous language because Indigenous languages are frowned upon in wider Mexican society.
In order to pursue and fulfill mestizaje, Vasconcelos literally said in La Raza cósmica that mestizaje was the voluntary extinction of Black and Indigenous peoples. And this contributed to what makes the modern citizen. And so what does it mean to not only identify with but also live in or adapt Indigenous cosmologies, Black cosmologies in a place that calls in some ways for your voluntary extinction, is powerful and I think one way that we can survive. And so the women's collectives that I've worked with and have interviewed over the last five years have shown me another way and give an example of what folks are doing, not only in this hemisphere, but globally.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you, Ash.
Amber, I'm wondering if you can also talk to the community-centered work that you experienced and witnessed.
I know that you write a lot. You critique a lot the conversations of Black Quantum and also the ways in which some Indigenous peoples actively reject the belonging of Black Natives. I don't know if you want to speak to that a little bit more.
AMBER STARKS: Yeah, I mean, I think when we think about the settler state here in the context of the US, we have to think about how our Native ancestors were forcibly pushed aside so that our Black ancestors could be human-trafficked and worked on those ancestral lands of our ancestors.
I mean, I think about that a lot, being a South Eastern Native, and how both of these situations affect me as a Black Indigenous woman. And I think about the policies that then followed that.
So Blood Quantum, the policy that-- its intention is to exterminate Native folks, using fractions, depleted fractions over and over. Eventually, that policy says then there are no more Natives. On the other hand, we have the one-drop rule, which says that if you are just a tiny one drop bit of Black, everything else doesn't matter. You are no longer those things. You are Black.
And the reason for that is around utility, turning us into capitalist products of the state. And in that way, its intention is to take away any sense of identity, take away any sense of self, any sense of autonomy, any sense of connection to the land, to our people and, as Ashley said, disrupt even our indigeneity from Africa. So we become bodies and products that the state can commodify and use for its own purpose.
And so for me, speaking to Blood Quantum is me asking us as Indigenous peoples to not perpetuate the very thing that is meant to both destroy us, but also to destroy Black Indigenous bodies. And my hope is that when I'm speaking to this, that we're realizing nthat we're not really protecting ourselves. We're actually reinforcing the settler state. We're saying decolonize and land back. And we're saying all these very important messaging around owning our sovereignty and thriving in our sovereignty, yet we're upholding the very things that are meant to destroy us, to genocide, right?
And so for me, the idea that we're speaking to sovereignty and at the same time disrupting our sovereignty using Blood Quantum, using things like the one-drop rule to erase our Afro-Indigenous relatives. And not only Afro-Indigenous, any relative whose identity is also multi-dimensional, who come from European ancestors, or Asian ancestry, or who whoever. And so I'm asking us to think about ways in which we recognize kinship outside of the policies and ideologies of a settler state, a colonial project because that's what these are. That's what these policies are meant to do, is to strip us of any sense of who we were before prior and give us no future.
It's asking us to participate in dismantling our own future. And so I think that-- and a lot of times, we're using these policies because we think they will protect us. We think that if everybody was full-blood, then we could go back to the way it was prior to this, and it would be OK.
But I think that we're stealing from one another. We're stealing our connections to our peoples and to our futures when we tell people you're 5/120, whatever, therefore you are or not. We as Indigenous peoples know that indigeneity is not what the settler state says it is. We know that the settler state cannot tell us that we're Indigenous or not.
And so when we co-sign with policies like Blood Quantum or the one-drop rule, we're acknowledging the settler state is a real thing. And I want us to be honest that and tell our--we have to be honest and say that this is a project. It's not a real thing.
ASHLEY NGOZI AGBASOGA: Absolutely.
AMBER STARKS: We've existed outside of it. We've existed before, and we will exist after. And so if we're interested in really being sovereign people, we need to critique these things that are meant for our destruction.
End of sermon.
ASHLEY NGOZI AGBASOGA: Absolutely.
And yes, (LAUGHS) and I completely agree, especially, I would like to say I think we just need to get rid of blood logics as a form of relation in general. What does that even mean? Blood, like who's your blood quantum? We are whole. We do not come in parts, right?
This is a very colonial way of kinship, of relation, and it is meant to eliminate or enslave folks. That's what it intended to do when these categories were formulated. And so what does it mean to connect to folks, to community, to Blackness, to indigeneity outside of these blood logics, outside of these settler terms, I think, is crucial. Not only to solidarity and all that, but also to get free.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you, both of you.
I think that what you both just articulated really reminds me of what Black feminist taught and Indigenous feminism has taught us. And it's this idea of body sovereignty, right?
How are we going-- how are we going to expect to get the land back or to decolonize when our bodies are still being owned and possessed by other entities? And I think particularly, as people who are conditioned, our quotidian reality is a Black reality. It's one of the first things people see about us the minute they look at us.
And Amber, when you're talking about how these policies will not protect anybody, and Black Quantum, it doesn't-- Ashley, you just said we're whole people. We don't come in pieces. And I think it's particularly important when we talk about the body. Because one of the scholars who I really appreciate is Tiffany Lethabo King in The Black Shoals. She talks about the ways in which it would be a disservice to claim innocence on Black and Indigenous relationships.
Because Black and Indigenous people are not innocent, vulnerable people that have never enacted harm. To be born into the conditions of Blackness and indigeneity in this moment require us to talk about the nuances of the past and the ways in which we were put against each other at some point, so then make us rely on these policies and these claims to citizenship.
And Ashley, you've pushed to think towards an African Black and-- African indigeneity is so important. Because it's a completely different reality. It's like the Black is the Indigenous and vice versa.
I don't know if you all want to say more to body sovereignty and looking at indigeneity outside of the US.
AMBER STARKS: That is such a great question because I feel, again, during this time, not only exploring my own indigeneity, but thinking about Black bodies, Black people as Indigenous is thinking about it globally. And even thinking about my Australian, New Zealand, Southeast Asian bodies who own Blackness in a different context, I have definitely-- my frame has been pushed in.
And I'm thinking about how global anti-Blackness and even Afrophobia, how that plays into the world upholding white supremacy.
And I think that body sovereignty, accepting Blackness and accepting that Blackness can be Indigenous is a really powerful and uplifting thing for me. And I hope for other Black folks who, in a lot of ways, are trying to find out who their people were. A lot of us have been stolen from our Indigenous cultures.
And my Black side, I don't know. I have no idea who my people are from Africa. In a lot of ways, that's really heartbreaking. And there's a sense of longing there that I feel like I don't know if I'll ever be able to fulfill. And I feel a little fortunate that I have my indigeneity to this place that gives me-- that fulfills something in me that I feel like I don't know that I will ever be able to have being Black Indigenous from another place.
But I'm totally rambling because I'm just thinking about how that longing does exist in me to know Blackness from my African heritage. But I do think, thinking about Black bodies, being Indigenous, and having the potential for indigeneity, I think also gives us back our humanity in a lot of ways. For those of us who have been part of the enslavement project, we are-- in our humanness, our humanity and our indigeneity was stolen.
And so I think that evenjust claiming I am a body, I am descendants of Indigenous peoples, I know, for me, that gives me a sense of pride, and it gives me a sense of authority in my humanity, if that makes any sense. So yeah, I think those are just my general thoughts. But I do want to say that I have been thinking really broadly about Black Indigenous peoples globally and how being in relationship with Black bodies globally reinforces that white supremacy has to be dismantled.
Settler colonialism has to be dismantled because how Black folks are treated around the world is all rooted in these same types of things, possessing Black bodies, destroying Indigenous peoples, stealing land, and stealing those connections to lands and to kinship and relationship.
ASHLEY NGOZI AGBASOGA: This is a good question that I have a thousand answers to. (LAUGHS) And a thousand I don't know at alls.
I would say I think-- so I took-- or rather, I audited a course, a global Indigenous histories course with a professor named Doug Kiel at Northwestern last quarter-- or last year, something like that.
I don't know. What is time? Time is the white man's.
And there was-- I found myself getting annoyed at the ways that the term Indigenous can sometimes travel. And I think there's a lot of power in it. There's a lot of power in knowing your nation, knowing being Indigenous, but also the ways in which folks, Indigenous Africans to make them closer to human.
And I'm like, nah. There's so much more (LAUGHS) than a humanizing project. I myself-- I'm like, OK, we're people. We're all-- I'm not necessarily interested in becoming human, per se, or getting closer to human. Because I feel like a lot of those efforts equate to the same stuff around citizenship. Like how am I a better citizen of the nation?
The citizen is bound in the human, and the human is-- or the conception of human like Sylvia Wynter and others takes-- I'm just not-- I guess what I'm trying to say is my indigeneity and my Blackness goes beyond any sort of humanizing project. And I think that's what I want to say for now. I'm figuring this out. (LAUGHs)
So yeah. But I want to caution-- I think about this sig that I held up once at a rally at my alma mater, at Brooklyn College CUNY stand up. And there was-- me and another good friend were holding this sign. And I think I said, “Why do I have to prove my humanity?”
And that I feel like sometime I lose sleep over that sign. Because I think it asked me to fall into a line of thinking or a-- I don't have a word for it right now. But a line of thinking, if you will, that was oftentimes made to dehumanize, if that makes sense.
So what would it mean to think through our practices and our cosmologies once again, to imagine ourselves outside of the humanizing project, per se, that has been detrimental for centuries to our communities, if that makes sense.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: It does. Yeah, go ahead, Amber.
AMBER STARKS: Quickly to the lateral violence piece at the end of your question or part of your questions, last statement.
I definitely think that the settler state project used Black and Native folks against one another. I know that when we-- even online, when I see these discussions, well, Native folks own slaves.
And oh, what about the Buffalo Soldiers?
I think about the ways in which this project-- this colonial project was meant for our destruction and use whatever tools necessary to make sure our destruction was imminent, that it was deeply-rooted in our thinking, even becoming parts of our cultures.
And Blood Quantum was originally was like, oh, OK, we're going to recognize that you're Native, and you'll be special if you're whole, if you're wholly Native, whatever, like fully. And then those people over there won't be. And so seeing those people as a threat to what you have, what we've given you, you know, "given you," put us against one another.
And I think also, thinking about the Buffalo Soldiers, learning a lot about them-- I know in the Black community, we're proud, right? The Buffalo Soldiers represent this regal men of valor, that whole military thing that also has this problematic stuff.
But when we think about Southwestern Natives and their first experience, some of their first experiences with the settler state were Black Buffalo Soldiers, and even learning white supremacy through the Buffalo Soldiers.
And I've definitely heard stories from folks online, relatives online who told me about their grandparents stories or great grandparents stories of how the Buffalo Soldiers treated them different than the white soldiers who came eventually.
But I still want us to recognize how the settler state used us against one another. And this is where we are now as a continuation of that. It's not anything new. It's just morphed into this new-- just another facet. And so when I'm speaking to Blood Quantum and when I'm speaking to Afro indigeneity or uniting the Black and Native folks, I also want to be mindful that I'm not erasing the lateral harms that have occurred.
Even in my tribe, the slavery that existed in our Freedmen who now are fighting to just be recognized in our nations, fighting to be recognized as part of our community, as part of our kinship, I think that we can heal if we don't acknowledge that there's been some real harm done within our community.
But we also have to take a step back and understand the intention of it and again, why it was done. And think that we're going to have to find some ways to heal from that with one another, not separately.
So yeah, I think lateral violence is a real thing. And we can't pretend it doesn't exist or it didn't exist. And if we don't address it, my fear is that we will-- even in a post-colonial world, these things will still seep into our decolonization.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you, Amber. It just reminds me a lot of the conversations about how white supremacy doesn't require a white body. It requires the logic. And this-- if the goal-- the goal was extermination of Black and Indigenous people. And that goal failed, right?
So the follow up was, well, now, we need to instill the logic in Black and Indigenous people, which is where a lot of these ruptures come in that people don't yet have language for. Because we think that the problems are amongst us. We don't know how to be in community. But the problem is we've inherited a way of thinking, a way of moving in the world that we're comfortable with and we've normalized.
And when we're asked to denounce it, we don't have other frameworks because it's always this idea of we should never build or organize our own identities. We should organize around visions and goals. Because identities are unstable.
Blackness is unstable. It changes anywhere you go. Some places have different names, depending on how dark, how light you are.
Indigeneity is unstable everywhere you go.
So this idea of organizing around these identities will not work. If you have a very clear vision and mission, well, then maybe something will happen because you're not depending on certain ways of understanding sociality and the geography that you're in.
AMBER STARKS: That's brilliant. So I decided. That's brilliant.
ASHLEY NGOZI AGBASOGA: Alan is brilliant.
And I wanted to piggyback off of you, Amber, and say-- there's a line by the scholar that Alan mentioned earlier, Tiffany Lethabo King, where there are these-- whenever-- especially on Twitter, where some folks will be like, oh, they are Buffalo Soldiers that killed in the Southwest. And then there will be folks that will say, oh, Natives in the Southeast enslaved Africans. There's a line in her most recent book. I'm not going to get it verbatim, but it says something about how everyone-- I mean, these folks try to also play into the state project of becoming human or becoming more closer to humanity or citizenship. And it didn't work for either one of us.
And so what does it mean to grapple with these tough histories and the ways in which we have harmed each other?
Also who I work in Mexico, a lot of archival documents and stuff will note antagonisms between Black and Native peoples there. And one question that some scholars, including myself, have raised is, well, who are the authors of these documents? There are folks, there are communities that are Black Native or Black Indigenous that have lived side by side or together for centuries and have relied on one another to live.
And who writes the documentation to say like, oh, these are antagonistic. And therefore, what does that work do later on to create even more or prolong antagonisms between Black and Native folks in this hemisphere.
And so I would like to think of also the ways in which we have been there for each other,how basically-- a few weeks ago, there was the Black Indigenous solidarity rally in Chicago.And one of the speakers before the march said, listen, if Black and Indigenous peoples unite, there's no way the state--the settler state can actually exist because it depends on our subjugation in different ways.
And I think folks were scared. And I think they should be.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you.
We have about seven minutes left. And I'm wondering if you want to take some questions from the Q&A that have come in in Zoom.
Let's see.
So the first question we got early on when this started was, what advice do you have for folks who are just beginning on this process of critical consciousness in the face of disdain? How might we come to learn what we don't know? How do we know what we don't know?
AMBER STARKS: I think a lot of us are still there, even those of us who are speaking to this. I want to affirm that it's OK to be where you are. I think that all of us are trying to navigate this.
And I think when people message me and say, oh, how did you do it, and to be honest, reconnecting or any of those things takes time. This is a journey.
And I think I had the realization maybe a month ago that reconnecting is my walk home, just like my ancestors were forced to walk on the Trail of Tears away from their connection to the lands, the places that we call home.
It’s really one step at a time.It's really looking for community, searching for community. It's really hard work. I don't want to pretend that--I've just arrived, like I said at the beginning. I don't think I've arrived or am arriving so much, is that I'm learning what it means to exist in a Black and Indigenous body, to own that,and to thrive in that.
And so I think reaching out for community is-- I mean, I think that that's a huge part of being Indigenous in a lot of ways, is that connection to one another. So I know for me, online was kind of the way that I started to develop those relationships. If you know your tribe or your people, your nation, some of them have cultural departments. I would reach out to them.
Books are amazing. I've read tons of books.
But I mean, I want to say that I really relied on the online community to-- I've been heavily reliant on the online community to help support me in my own journey for my own identity and things like that. So that's some hopefully helpful advice.
ASHLEY NGOZI AGBASOGA: Whenever I get this question, the first thing that comes to mind is listen. Listen to elders. Listen to community. Listen to various voices. Read, which I think if you read deeply, it's a form of listening.
Yeah.
And that don't ever think you have it all figured out. (LAUGHS). I think it's an ongoing process, like everything else. Yeah, definitely.
In terms of reconnecting, that's something that I am personally going through, as well as Amber and others. And even if someone is, say, enrolled or grew up where their folks are, there's many ways that folks also reconnect. So we're just at different manifestations of that.
And just keep fighting the good fight, I guess. (LAUGHS)
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you. I'm wondering if either of you have a question for each other.
ASHLEY NGOZI AGBASOGA: How are you all so brilliant? (LAUGHS)
Like, how'd y'all get to both where you are?
AMBER STARKS: Because I feel like you--
ASHLEY NGOZI AGBASOGA: No peers.
[LAUGHING]
AMBER STARKS: --will be challenged.
Ideas around humanity.
Because one thing that you said about becoming human, I think even in a lot of our thoughts, we think of whiteness as humanity, like that's the arrival. When it's like, no, you've always been. And so that was a really good challenge.
So I appreciate you.
ASHLEY NGOZI AGBASOGA: And I appreciate you and this space.
Would we-- should we do one more question or should we finish?
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: We have about, let's see, two minutes. So I guess-- oh, this is a very specific question. How do you begin disrupting the idea of Blood Quantum when you may be someone who does not fit the enrollment requirements and may be already looked down on? Is it going straight to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, talking with surrounding nations or working within tribes?
AMBER STARKS: Ooh. I say it starts with you not believing in it. Honestly, I know that there's the political aspect of it, but it also is like dealing with what you think about it, what you believe.
And I think that being bold enough to say I don't believe it, even in the face of it existing, just like we've been seeking to abolition, like we don't want police. We don't want-- but that still is an institution. And so then--I mean, I don't know if these institutions are ready to let go of this because of the power that it holds. But I think that there has to be some kind of bravery in spite of it.
I do think that people within nations, because believe in tribal sovereignty, are the ones that are going to eventually have to do the work. But if you have kinship with folks who are enrolled and you're unenrolled, I think having those conversations with them is really important. Because in the end, they're the ones who have the voting power within their tribe to do so.
But I think we have to be speaking to these things often until it's heard. So planting those seeds is what I think you can do.
ASHLEY NGOZI AGBASOGA: Yeah. Conversations. A lot of conversations need to be had and are already being had, where there are a lot of folks that are like, uh-uh, we're not the central-- tribal government may still utilize Blood Quantum or other factors because there are other factors for enrollment in other nations.
But some folks are like, these are limiting to our kinfolk who have claimed to our community. So I already know folks that are already starting this conversations, especially on the internet, like on Instagram and Twitter, et cetera.
And a question I always ask myself, I guess, now is what does it mean to be enrolled versus an embodiment of indigeneity or Blackness. I think that's a question that one has to take up with oneself and their community.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you. And think that one-- oh, Amber, I think you're on mute.
AMBER STARKS: I wanted to say that I think that enrollment is more the political piece than the kinship piece. And so dismantling politics is different than owning that yourself.
So yes, yes, Ashley.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Oh my gosh, there's one thing I want to say. Maybe I'll say it in under a minute.
One, enrollment is a really good question, I think, particularly for Black folk because under settler law, the opposite of the citizen is not the noncitizen. It is the criminal and those who are protected from the-- who are protected from the criminals, who are protected from terrorists.
And I think that when it comes to Blackness, because we are criminalized, when we talk about indigeneities and how they're enrolled and how they're accepted, it's like our Black people not being accepted into their Indigenous communities because of this settle logic of criminality and not a fit-enough citizen. So I think also interrogating the idea of enrollment in relationship to the project of anti-Blackness.
But we are at time. Thank you, Amber. Thank you, Ashley.
ASHLEY NGOZI AGBASOGA: (LAUGHS)
AMBER STARKS: That last, it was like-- ahh, yes, can we interrogate?
Wow.
ASHLEY NGOZI AGBASOGA: There's so much to say. And even outside of enrollment, in places where enrollment is not a thing, like we're
AMBER STARKS: Man, that was a whole word.
ASHLEY NGOZI AGBASOGA: Oh, there's so much to say.
We're out of time.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Yeah, but thank you for agreeing to be in conversation. This was a really great space. I hope that we can have more conversations like this.
I do want to say that we have-- so the Radical Kinship Series is running this whole academic year. And it's bringing courageous conversations to campus. The next event that we're having is on October 29. And it is “Black Trans Intimacies and Building Futures in the Present”. We're going to have three Black trans artists sharing their art and also talking about the relationship that art has to intimacy, when in moments like this, intimacy seems to be the thing that most of us are lacking.
So thank you, everyone. I hope that we can see you again next month.
AMBER STARKS: Yay.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Bye-bye.