Hey, we're going to meet in an hour, and I wanted to remind you about it and also remind you of the things we read

This week I read parts 17-20:

• part 17: Aabijijiwan, Continual Flowing
• part 18: Recapturing
• part 19: Seeing the Forest from the Lake
• part 20: Being a River

I'm just going to share some snippets that I'm thinking about, and would be keen to hear people's reflections on, if we all get together and nobody has any pressing thoughts to share:

Recapturing

Indigenous Knowledge is regularly captured by elites—some working in the academy, some working for state bureaucracies—who separate our knowledge from our bodies, from our peoples and from political projects and, too often now, deploy it in the service of neoliberalism.

...

Indigenous understandings of the world are processed, depoliticized, sanitized and colonized into a form that is nearly unrecognizable to the Knowledge Holders who shared it in the first place.

Seeing the Forest from the Lake

... sensationalizing the narrative of a single violent individual targeting Indigenous women fails to expose the systemic nature of such violence against Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit and queer peoples.

Slain is the word I encounter over and over as I comb through the debris of news articles on these four women.

Hunted is the word in my head.

... while there was a larger outcry online against “Pretendians” than about the murder of the four women in Winnipeg, we should avoid a hierarchy of oppression and instead see identity fraud, particularly when it is done by white women, as another form of making Indigenous lives disappear, akin to the appropriation of land, water, resources, culture and lives.

Being a River

We are not owed the lives of other living things.

We are not owed the planet.

We are not owed comfortable lives.

video chat details

In about an hour (at 5p ET, or 9p UTC) let's get together and chat about whatever we've read this week. The link to join is here (if that doesn't work, the url is below)

https://al2.in/ReadingGroupRoom

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