Rehearsals for Living by Robyn Maynard & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Author:Robyn Maynard & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson [Maynard, Robyn & Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Feminism & Feminist Theory, Indigenous Studies, Political Science, Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, Penology
ISBN: 9781642597158
Google: 6zVTEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2022-06-28T20:49:34+00:00

We’re in this highly destructive system, and it’s built on heteropatriarchy. It’s built on colonialism. And breaking out of that means having the imagination to think through other alternatives. For queer people and for Indigenous people alike, we’re already living those alternatives. And so the constructive project of building a different world is something that we’re already practicing. It’s not just saying “no” to the pipelines. We’re engaged in that world-building project already. And I think that’s what draws us to land defence. We know we need to protect the territory, but we also need to build something else that’s going to continue to feed our relations into the future.

To build something else.

#ReconciliationIsDead holds lessons for us all, in which queer, young Indigenous peoples’ demand for the return of land and an end to violent extraction, their seeking of not new or better relationships with the state, but to build something else, extends a promise for a future on different terms.

I learned from Ojore Lutalo, who spent twenty-eight years in a New Jersey state prison, that “we are our own liberators. We have to define our own reality.” Leanne, I’m with you here: we deserve forms of homespace that allow life, in all of its forms, to proliferate. This belief—a shared politic—is what grounds my solidarity with you and yours. It is not contingent on reciprocity. I will forever choose to align, politically, with those who would continue to work toward liberated territories, bodies, lives, and homespaces, in whatever form that takes. Against any form of governance that relies on land dispossession, that renders some of us criminal, alien, or forced to the constitutive outside of belonging.

I believe in forging a shared politic. Undergirded by the knowledge, and belief, that “where life is precious, life is precious,” and forging political solidarities to value life. I believe in forging a politic that is centred, too, on the multi-valent needs of those who least have access to a livable life. We start from here and move outward.

I believe that I am able, that we are able, to commit together to demanding the impossible because we are steeped in old-new, future-oriented political traditions that show us that there is nothing inevitable about the present, that it need not be permanent. We are able to demand alternative timelines because consciousness is born of generations of struggle, because we are so very fortunate to come from political traditions of radicalism that are collective, and communal, that are against accumulation and individualism. These not only expose the lie of Western historiography but offer a vastly expansive vision that is so much richer than the death cult that is proffered by a white supremacist society.

Abolition is imagination work, anti-colonial struggle is imagination work, conjure work, science fiction in real time. It is daring to see that the world now did not need to be as it was, does not need to be as it is, and certainly, most importantly, need not—will not—remain this way. It is too much justice, re-imagining and refashioning governance as abundance rather than enclosure.

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