Our House Is on Fire

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I always think that Eduardo Galeano's description "In the colonial to neocolonial alchemy, gold changes to scrap metal and food to poison. We have become painfully aware of the mortality of wealth which nature bestows and imperialism appropriates.” Great Latin American scholar writing about, pretty much, the world. You know, each generation, there's something new that is taken. And I refer to it as windigo economics. It's not a unique term, but it's in Anishinaabe culture, there is this being that is a spirit, but it is also manifested in people called a windigo. A windigo, which is a cannibal. You know, and in the winter time in our territory, which is the far north—it was minus three yesterday at home, you all got that. I think that's coming your way, but maybe not quite for a while. [Laughter] Welcome to climate change. In the far north, winter is something that you got to be pretty much on about. In the pre-fossil fuels, "let me just go plug in my thermostat and up that heat a little bit." In the actual real world, before climate-controlled technology, winter is something that you might want to reckon with, in a respectful way. That's part of this whole decolonizing how we think, because we're all pretty much fossil fuel addicts and we just assume it's all good in the hood. It's not. There's a lot of variables involved with this. But in our Indigenous experience with the windigo, there was this being that would come and take and destroy without any remorse or without any gratitude. Feared, widely, you know, just come lay to waste your village or lay to waste a household, you know, because our villages in the north, like small winter villages, that's when they would come, the windigo, the time of the windigo. But that is manifest in an economic practice. And you know, that economic practice is what Naomi has described, which is taking more than you need and not leaving the rest; laying to waste, move on. It's really very American. This whole transience that is America…

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I think that what is happening now in terms of companies like Facebook and Twitter, and the ways in which we are allowing our minds to be controlled by corporate algorithms all of the time. Combining with a mentality that we as individuals will not advance in this brutal winner/loser economy, unless we ourselves think of ourselves as a little minicorporations, individual brands that we have to be promoting nonstop on these corporate platforms. Even if our brand is revolution, even if our brand is liberation, we're doing it on platforms that are wholly owned and controlled by the wealthiest people on this planet. Leanne Simpson, who's somebody who's an Anishinaabe intellectual who lives in Ontario and very influenced by Winona's work. She used to be very active on social media and she writes about, in As We Have Always Done, a really wonderful book of hers, about how even I don't know more played out on these platforms, and Leanne is one of many people who just decided to get off the platforms. I think more and more, if we can't figure out a way to be on, use these as tools for our ends, as opposed to be used by them, we don't really have any hope of talking about decolonization, honestly. I think it does start with thinking about how determined our, like all our lives are, the time that we spend. And if we're spending hours and hours on these platforms and processing our lived experience as consumable products, that can be consumed by others, and always imagining how every moment is going to be resold, I don't see how we get out of that. At the same time, as what the stage of late capitalism is, as we hear more and more, data is the new oil. Our most intimate selves, our relationships with friends, our innermost thoughts—that is the raw material for this stage of capitalism, which exists simultaneously to all of the other extractivist stages. It's not like you finish one and you move on to the other. We're still extracting all the raw resources in the same way and building the pipelines that we all still have to fight. But at the same time there is this other pipeline and it's straight from our brains, right. So, I don't think we are going to win any of it, unless we really think about how we're going to liberate ourselves from that mentality, that has trained us to see ourselves as products and has colonized our movements and our sense of self.

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I want you to just kind of imagine—my idea of when America was great is when you could drink the water from every river and lake. That's when America was great. When there were 50 million buffalo, America was great. When passenger pigeons darkened the skies, that's when America was great and when there were oysters, here. I'm saying, that's wealth, that's wealth and that's greatness. And so I just kind of say that and I always, I remember because I still live in the place where the wild things are. I still live there. I live up in a reservation in Northern Minnesota, the White Earth Reservation. It's the headwaters of both the Mississippi and the Red Rivers. I think about that a lot at times. I have a lot of grandchildren, and a lot of kids that call me Granny. I always take them, I say, “Look, here you pray, it goes north, here you pray, it goes south, that's cool, huh.” Where I live you still have corn, you have wild rice in great abundance. Wild rice or manoomin, our most sacred food that we follow, that's the food that grows on the water that we were instructed to follow by our prophets, right. And we have all of this tremendous biodiversity that we have. This year, I was the year, you know, if I was going to do a winter count for this year, I'd call it the year of eating milkweed. I never ate so much milkweed in my whole life. Now you guys probably don't even have a lot of that, but that's what those monarchs eat, so I felt like, kinda cool ‘cause I'm eatin’ with the butterflies, right. But you can eat every part of that plant, those leaves are kinda like, they're so good—the pods, isn't that interesting? You can eat the whole dang thing. So yummy. But anyway, that's part of the biodiversity that exists in the natural world and so my covenant, my responsibility, is to keep that. That's the deal with being Anishinaabe.

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But the point is that people say you can't meet present demand with renewable energy. That's the mantra of fear mongering that continues across the country. You're going to freeze in the dark. I was like what if you didn't waste 60% of your power, 66% of your power is rejected energy. The basics of this is, without getting all super geeky on you all, is look, they make this in energy that they dig these rocks out of, they waste all this power in the process everywhere along the way, until you have this huge amount of inefficiency in the system. Capitalism rewards for use, not for efficiency, right, so the more you waste, the better it is and the more you use, the better it is. Which is like an ass backwards, excuse my French, economy. That's not well-being and that's not sustainable, right. So that's what I'm saying is we don't want to meet that 66%, we want to reduce stupidity in the materials and energy economy so that we are being coherent. How's that for a simple explanation?

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We also have to understand that this is a war. That the fossil fuel industry, and the banks that finance them, have spent decades fighting against tiny, incremental, inadequate responses to the climate crisis. When you think about the amount, the tens of millions of dollars that they put into fighting cap and trade, imagine what they are going to try to do to defeat an actual plan [Laughter], which would require that they leave trillions of dollars’ worth of fossil fuels in the ground. So, we need a fighter. So, it's not enough to just say a lot of nice things on the campaign trail. There has to be a track record of actually standing up to power because why else would you believe that this is going to happen. I also believe that there needs to be, it can't just be about one person being a fighter. It has to be about a plan to actually build a counter power, right. And this is a big part of what makes Bernie's campaign different is that it is really fundamentally about building a movement—this whole idea of not me, us.

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We had a fantastic event on the college [inaudible] campus about a month ago called Care Work Is Climate Work. So, yes, we can create lots of green jobs in building that electric rail and putting up cooperatively owned renewable energy, and we need to do all of that in transit, in efficiency, and in green energy. But we also need to recognize the low-carbon work that is already happening, that is low paid and undervalued and sometimes completely unpaid, and that's the care economy. And it's overwhelmingly work that's done by women, overwhelmingly work that's done by women of color. So, this panel that we had brought together teachers, home care workers, nurses, and disability rights advocates to talk about this care work as low-carbon work, right. It doesn't burn a lot of carbon to take care of elderly people. It doesn't burn a lot of carbon to teach kids. So, what would happen if we actually made these well-paying jobs? And what would happen if we said, you know, how we create a Green New Deal in the education sector is not just having solar panels on the roof and organically grown local produce in the cafeteria and electric school buses, though it is all that, it is all that hard infrastructure. It's also saying to teachers, instead of having 31 kids in your class, you're just going to have 12 and you'll finally be able to do your job as you want to be able to do it. Because that doesn't burn a lot of carbon in order to invest in people in that way. So, I think we need to expand that definition. Some friends of mine in the Indigenous rights movement have been talking for a long time about how water protection, land protection, care for the land is also labor, which not only is not paid and not valued, but is actively criminalized and, and people get thrown in jail for daring to protect their water and their land.

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The next thing, I just want to say to the sister, I never think of it as land development, I think that's like a whole colonial phrase. So, we're going to take that off the table. What's your opportunity for a relationship to this one place? What can you do there in this place that make a difference? That restores something, that makes something beautiful inside it or outside it, right. That's how I look at it. You have this chance to do something that's going to liberate someone's thinking because they saw that there is a vertical greenhouse, solar, I don't know, I'm making up stuff, but, you know, like that. I was in Winnipeg last week, we travel all the time she and I, I was in Winnipeg, and there was a Fort Gary Hotel which is named after that, it was a fort. It's really a massively beautiful architectural testimony to colonialism. But the roof, my publisher from Fernwood Press, he makes honey from the bees on the roof. You know, it's like such a decolonization thing. I was like, "How is the honey up there this year?" He says, "I got 700 pounds of honey off the roof of that hotel." I was like, "That's making life." I was like, "What do you do with your bees in the winter?" He says, "I got a little bee spa." [Laughter] That's what he called it, because this whole thing about the bees moving around and saving the bees. He's got some old barn up there that they heated perfectly and they got a beekeeper for the spa [Laughter]. [Sounds good.] I was like, talk about like making right. So, find your spot and make something right. That's my thinking on that, and then, that's kinda this reconciliation question. Then of the question of the sister about us helping, this stuff that Naomi and I are saying is like solid stuff, but we're not the keepers of this. This is how we're going to change. And each place has its own little story that it's going to make. Because my story of solar panels would work here. I'm saying I'm a Northern person, so a lot of my stuff might work here, but Newark gonna learn from someplace else that's a bigger city than my little reservation, and how you build infrastructure that's going to help your people survive.