“If you’re trying to destroy things that are as massive as the structures and the institutions that we talk about wanting to get rid of, that we talk about wanting to overthrow, you’re going to have to sustain yourself,” says organizer and author William C. Anderson. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” host Kelly Hayes talks with Anderson, Robyn Maynard, Harsha Walia, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Mahdi Sabbagh, and others about the crises of trauma, grief and overwhelm in our communities, and the kind of healing activists need to stay in the fight.
Music by Son Monarcas, Leela Gilday & Wiiliideh Drummers
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are going to talk about the crises of trauma, grief, and overwhelm that so many of our communities are wrestling with right now and the kind of healing we need to move forward. This is the first episode in a non-consecutive series we’re putting together about mental health and healing. I think many of you will agree that conversations on these topics are sorely needed. I have been struggling a great deal myself this year as I have navigated depression, physical pain and horrific news cycles. There have been days when I have felt so heartsick and overwhelmed that getting out of bed has been a struggle. Fortunately, I received some much-needed relief last week in the form of a land-based solidarity gathering on Dene land in the Northwest Territories. The week-long event was hosted by Dechinta, a cultural education organization that connects Dene youth with the wisdom of their elders. In an effort to deepen solidarities across borders and movements, Dechinta organizers invited a group of activists, organizers, scholars, and poets to spend a week engaging with the land and each other while also learning from Dene youth and elders. Participants traveled from as far away as Hawaii and Australia to join the convening.
I had high hopes that this trip might be a restorative experience, and I was not disappointed. Given that many of you are also in need of restoration, I decided to do my best to bring my listeners and readers along with me. So, I invite you to join me over the next hour and hear from some of the insightful organizers, authors and Dene youth whom I spent time with last week. I had a lot of important conversations with people like Robyn Maynard, Harsha Walia, Leanne Simpson, Mahdi Sabbagh and William C. Anderson about the emotional crises our communities are facing, what we and our co-strugglers need right now, and how connecting with the land can be a healing experience.
You will also hear music from Dene singer/songwriter Leela Gilday and the Wiiliideh Drummers. Leela gave a stirring performance at our lakeside camp that moved me to tears, and our friend Randy opened and closed the camp with his drumming. I hope their music can offer you a greater connection to the healing we found as we laughed, learned, and wept together in a wilderness so far north that the sun was always with us.
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[musical interlude]
KH: The Dechinta camp was a very unique space, cultivated by a remarkable organization. Leanne Simpson, co-author of Rehearsals for Living, explained the group’s background.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson: My name is Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. I’m Mississauga Nishnaabeg and a member of Alderville First Nation. I’m a writer and a musician and an academic, and I’m an educator at the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, and I use she/her pronouns.
Dechinta is a post-secondary education program that is land-based, and it’s based in the northern part of Canada in the Northwest Territories. Our home is in the territory of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, and we take students out on the land for weeks at a time and base ourselves in our learning community in Dene land-based practices. So things like fishing and trapping and hunting, medicines, hide tanning, processing fish and meat, learning how to live together following Dene laws, how to resolve conflicts and live together in a good way according to the teachings of the Dene.
So we’ve been operating for over a decade. We have five courses that are accredited through The University of British Columbia. Through our early research, we found that the biggest barrier to post-secondary education in the north for Indigenous women was child care. So our elders really implored us to make our learning community family-centered and provide support for parents and kids so that they could learn together on the land. Students come to our program, we spend the mornings with the elders, we spend the afternoon doing reading and writing, and discussing the issues that have come up for learning critical thinking skills. And then students can use the credits to transfer to universities in the south, or they can just take the certificate back to their home communities and continue their community-based work.
In the past few years, we’ve been expanding into different regions in the north, into Nunavut and Yukon and into different regions in the Northwest Territories. And we’ve also been expanding our program to artists to land-based arts practices and opening it up to community members who might not be interested in post-secondary university credits.
And so one of our foundational programs now is Liwe Camp, which is a fish camp that takes place in February on the frozen lake. Our elders will take groups of folks out to set nets, to fish nets, to process fish, and to send the fish home with people to eat and to feed their families.
And so that kind of intimacy and a kind of local outlook then kind of expanded into thinking about Indigenous forms of internationalism. It expanded into thinking of the earth as sort of this network of deep relationality that was based on reciprocity. And it started to make me think about connecting in meaningful ways to other anti-colonial movements, both locally and internationally.
Over the course of my work over the last few years, I’ve been traveling and I’ve been meeting people with really, really good hearts. And in my work at Dechinta, I connected with Kelsey Wrightson and Glen Coulthard, and we wrote a grant to bring some of these folks together to spend a week on the land with the elders from the Yellowknives Dene.
Doing a Dechinta program where we didn’t have a lot of expectations in terms of outcomes, it was sort of this alchemy of getting the right people together at the right time in this place that we love so much and seeing what happened. I think some tremendous things happened this week in terms of refuge and renewal and deepening our relationships to each other and expanding our understandings of concepts that we thought we understood. I think it was a really, really special week.
KH: As we arrived in camp, many of us were hurting. Some of us talked about how our communities were grieving and exhausted, and how we, ourselves, were just scraping by. While feelings of overwhelm were common, people described a spectrum of varied stressors and crises that their communities were grappling with.
Kyla Sadaya LeSage: My name is Kyla Sadaya LeSage. I am Vuntut Gwitchin from Old Crow and Anishinaabe from Garden River, Ontario. But I live and I grew up in Yellowknife on Yellowknife’s Dene territory, Chief Drygeese’s territory. I work at Dechinta. I am now the director of program development. So I work with communities to develop hide camps, fish camps, accredited programs, and I just work on the land a lot with elders and young people and support others to reconnect with the land. There’s lots of griefs in our communities because there’s less connection to the land. So we’re finding that our elders are passing away with such rich knowledge that hasn’t been passed on to the younger generations. And so they’re missing that gap of being on the land. And so our young people especially don’t have anything to do during the day in our remote communities, which then means that they’re really trying to find what works for them.
And at times, it’s addictions that come in. There’s lots of drug and alcohol use in the communities. There’s crazy drugs that are coming up from the south that are hitting our most remote communities and then spreading within there. And instead of being on the land, the youth are using these drugs and these substances, and there’s not the knowledge and the mentorship from elders to kind of get them out of those addictions and to really support them. I think being on the land, you’re so far removed from outside world, you’re not affected by drugs and alcohol. You’re learning with elders. You have such an amazing time where you’re growing and healing on the land, and I don’t see many of our young people getting the opportunity to do that.
And I think that has led to a lot of the suicide rates in northern communities and just like a sense of disconnect within Indigenous communities and in Indigenous youth. But our elders have such rich knowledge, like I mentioned, of healing and finding ways to reconnect with ourselves. We are such an expressive people. Indigenous people are always doing something, we’re always learning and we’re always on the land. And without that peace, there’s that emptiness. And so we’re really seeing our communities fall into drugs and alcohol and trying to really break that narrative up in the north. And I think that’s what we’re doing, especially at Dechinta, is reconnecting our elders and our young people and everybody back to the land in a sense of healing and in a sense of finding who people are instead of within the Western society.
William C. Anderson: My name is William C. Anderson. My pronouns are he/him/his, and I am a writer. I’m an independent scholar and, I guess, an organizer where I find places to organize.
I think at this particular time when I think about Black America, what’s called Black America, that there’s a lot of concern about regression and going back to a place that we feel like we’ve progressed from. There’s a lot of concern about the rolling back of progressive legislation and landmark victories from movements prior, like the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power era, even different reforms that happen throughout other eras. We’re seeing attacks on things like critical race theory. We’re seeing attacks on Black history. We’re seeing attacks on what’s called DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion. These sorts of things are making a very pronounced statement coming from the right wing and a fascist upsurge to Black people that the gains and the things that we have long taken, maybe, for granted in some cases, or assumed that they would always be there, it’s making a very pronounced statement that they’re erasable, that they are destroyable, that they are things that can be gotten rid of and rolled back.
So it’s making a lot of people feel concerned how much can be taken away. People are asking, “How much can be taken away? Where might we end up? Where are we going?” And it’s causing a lot of grief. There’s a lot of pain that elders are feeling. There’s a lot of pain that community members are feeling because people fought long and hard. No matter what you think about something like the Voting Rights Act or the Civil Rights Act, the people feel very proud about the work that they’ve done to get Black people whatever gains they could. So these things come with a lot of blood, sweat and tears, and people are concerned that it can all be taken away now and that we can end up in a place where we felt we’d never go back to.
In movement spaces, in particular, there’s a mixture of frustration and anger and sadness, and I think that it manifests as people maybe sometimes looking to the past for a strategy because that was the time that certain things were victorious or certain things may have improved in terms of conditions. But there is also a lot of worry that we’re not equipped, that we are ill-prepared for this moment in such a way that there may not be a hope or a stability that people would long for to be able to overcome the situation and to fight back in the ways that are needed.
So sometimes people feel like we need to go back and try things that may have worked before. Sometimes people might feel hopeless and some people might feel inspired to try to think of new strategies. So I see a variety of different things.
Harsha Walia: My name’s Harsha. I use she/her pronouns. I’m an organizer based in Vancouver, which is unceded Musqueam Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish territories. And I organize in anti-colonial, migrant justice abolitionist and internationalist struggles. I’d say in the present moment, grief is omnipresent and it feels like a time where we’re just metabolizing so much constant grief, not that it’s new, but especially our relations to the world are such that we’re metabolizing the grief of genocide in Gaza in a particular way in this moment.
The grief of many overlapping genocides on these lands, what it means to be living through an ongoing pandemic, one that has not ended and one that has really revealed to the world, yet again, the disposability of so many people’s lives under capitalism and colonialism and ableism and more. And I think also an immense grief........