An Ancestral Invitation to the Future: Mapping Resistance Through Black and Native Thought

• In Event: Interdisciplinary and Critical Conceptualizations of Climate Change Education and Research

Abstract

In the era of a growing #LandBack movement, the rise of prison and policing abolition work, there is an opportunity to radically reimagine the meanings of land, indigeneity, belonging, and care. As Native communities, we grapple with ongoing dispossession and gentrification, poor health outcomes and shortened life expectancies, police violence and poverty; all of which are inextricably related to colonialism, capitalism, and climate change. Who has the luxury to envision a future where we exist and thrive? Who among us are allowed to live into that future? An answer exists within organized resistance to the colonial project which will never value our lives, instead regarding us as sacrificial. What can it mean to return land and build futures based on an ethic of care for creation, while repairing devastated relationalities with land and with each other? In mapping ways of resistance toward shared freedom, we must also deconstruct and unlearn much of what we have been taught to value through colonial education systems historically and presently imposed on Black and Native communities. It is impossible to calculate the level of destruction done to our worlds by educational systems that limit Black and Native freedom dreams. Now more than ever, our obligations to the communities made most vulnerable and to each other are our priority. On lands where we are told that our first and most important relationships are with settlers, getting to know each other and love each other is one of the most hopeful acts we can claim. In caring for each other and ourselves, naming our bodies and minds and lands as sites of pleasure and fun, we are never only reducible to trauma. Our sacredness is in our fullness, our unrepentency, our mourning, our joy, and our feeling - not in our enduring or sacrificing ourselves on the frontlines just because that is what Black and Indigenous peoples are supposed to do. Together we make ceremony in the middle of cities, in devastated landscapes, from discards of material, and scraps of knowing – in many ways, these wastelands ceremonies are perhaps the most sacred of all. How do we practice land-based
Indigenous resistance in ways that honor Black liberation? How do we rebuild these lands as “home” for migrants, refugees, and undocumented folks when return home is often thought impossible? The stakes are nothing short of our lives and the continuation of our worlds. As Black and Native communities come together against and beyond the constraints of colonial
states to repair the damage that colonialism and climate change continue to inflict on our lands and bodies, the beautiful futures we envision come within our reach.

Author

• Erica Violet Lee, Independent Scholar