In “Grounding Conversations, Part 3: Returning to Care,” Dev slips into dreams of where they’re able to seek refuge: the care from their communities. These dreams are haunted by spirits as well, but they’re the spirits of our disabled and racialized and queer ancestors who taught them lessons of care, resilience, and survival.
In “Grounding Conversations, Part 3: Returning to Care,” Dev slips into dreams of where they’re able to seek refuge: the care from their communities. These dreams are haunted by spirits as well, but they’re the spirits of our disabled and racialized and queer ancestors who taught them lessons of care, resilience, and survival.
Dev Ramsawakh:
This is Grounding Conversations with Dev Ramsawakh for Radio Lumi. This six part segment series will lay the groundwork for the conversations that'll be happening on our broadcast during Luminato 2023, and provide a background on the frameworks with which our audio experiences attempt to engage. Many performance shows and arts festivals begin their programming with your typical land acknowledgement. However, many indigenous peoples have criticized the practice for relegating their relationship with the land to the past, which does more to alleviate settler guilt and discomfort than to demonstrate real solidarity and progressive action. In my relationship to Radio Lumi, I want to acknowledge these criticisms as a way to use my platform responsibly. I don't want to just acknowledge the trauma indigenous peoples from all over have had inflicted on them, but to address how our society collectively is hurt by the mechanics of colonialism. I want to try to offer a demonstration of ways to actively engage with decolonial concepts and a practice to move forward on an interconnected journey towards collective liberation.
In Grounding Conversations, I reveal myself as a time traveler, as I embark on a journey that weaves in and out of the past, presence and futures that are rooted in the festival's programming and our city's arts culture, tying them to the themes that the host here at Radio Lumi will be addressing from their own perspectives. This journey will be created using excerpts from my body of work to address the ongoing impacts of colonialism on our collective society and the underlying principles of disability justice that the San Francisco based disabled arts collective, Sins Invalid, imbued into the term when they coined it in 2005 in order to teach us how to resist our interlocking systems of oppression.
It's now time to embark on the third part of our journey, Returning to Care. I love dreaming. In my dreams anything is possible. The only barriers between me and what I desire exist only because I believe them into existence. I'm not held back by the doubts and skepticisms from outside voices who offer only criticism that hope is a waste of time, which means that I can also believe those barriers out of existence. It's usually just a matter of twisting and turning the pieces of chaos I turn through every day until I find just the right angle where they click into place and reveal truth. So I retreat to my dreams to escape the visions of capitalism's haunted forest of gnarled, strangling roots, twisting around every structure, trying to piece together the solutions using what I know. I know that one of my strengths is seeing patterns and parallels, and I know I feel a sense of responsibility to find the pattern that'll slay the beast that has turned my dreamland into nightmares.
I know that comes from internalizing the cries for help from members of my community because they feel petrified into statues of inaction. But I also know that I only find patterns by being in conversation and in relationships with my community, by listening to their needs and perspectives, by learning how to care for them and receive their care in return. Just in many fingers once reminded me to look to my community and to history for solutions. And I think about a conversation I had with Trevor Stratton, a board director for two-spirited people of the First Nations in Toronto, Katie and Campfire for an article I wrote for Vice earlier this year titled What The Fight Against HIV Can Teach Us About Surviving The Covid Era. We've been speaking about what we should have learned from the HIV Aids crisis of the eighties and nineties that we need to do to handle the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. And he told me about how the indigenous communities he worked with had navigated both crises.
Trevor Stratton:
Our communities took their own measures and set up blockades in some cases. They checked everyone coming in and out. We were delivering food hampers to the doors of people, with information about Covid, where to get tested, self testing kits, and whatever was available was provided along with cultural medicine, whether that be drumming or cultural activities for kids for during lockdown, essential medicines and checking in on people. That part also reminded me of the early days of HIV in Canada where we were dying by the thousands and we were setting up care team. We were checking on people and providing hampers and information and all that kind of stuff to people who had contracted HIV until the point where they need palliative care. And then there's a pivot to where you have palliative tubes and someone's coming to scoop the cat poop and make sure the cat's fed and water the plants, and another person comes in and helps change the sheets from all the sweating and helps sponge bath or just tell stories and actually holding someone's hand and saying, "It's okay, you can go now."
And for Covid, they were denied that. There's so many people who died alone, and that also reminds me of HIV in the very early years, or even sometimes now with marginalized communities who don't have a lot of information with the stigma so high around HIV. They died alone in the most horrible conditions where their families rejected them. They weren't connected to a community maybe in the city where they came from. That was happening all the time. And it reminded me of how our old people, our elders, and even younger people, no one could come in and see them. That was heartbreaking, and that did remind me of my friends who died alone. That was hard.
Dev Ramsawakh:
In 2021, I wrote an article for this magazine called How to Survive a Dystopia. An artist from a collective called Wheelhouse Duo that offers apocalypse planning workshops for marginalized people, Myriad who goes by first name only, had explained a theory from Lawrence Gross referred to as post-apocalyptic stress syndrome, which describes how indigenous peoples have already experienced and survived nearly every kind of apocalypse we've imagined in speculative fiction like genocides, famines, and pandemics. So it only made sense when Stratton explained to me that their care centered approach was rooted in the very teachings that colonialism and capitalism were trying to erase from the cultures they exploited.
Trevor Stratton:
The indigenous community, they took it on themselves and used traditional teachings and storytelling to fit Covid into the worldview. Things like this is just another disease that is the result of encroaching on the natural environment. Monkeypox, HIV from the Green Monkey, where Covid come from, the live market in China, Ebola from the bat. This is a result of, and I dare say, a failure of global management, but indigenous people don't see it as management. They see it as coexistence because we are part of it. We are not separate. We're not against nature and trying to survive despite nature. We belong to it. We're part of it, but because we are aware of our own existence, we have a special place of stewards here.
Dev Ramsawakh:
Another teaching he spoke of that others like Hopedina Edina Adler, Michelle Dumont, and Alexander, a gay indigenous man from Thunder Bay who spoke with me under a pseudonym for articles I wrote published with Extra Magazine last year have echoed, was the importance of intergenerational care and relationships.
Trevor Stratton:
The elders' job was to take care of the youth because people in the working ages, our job was to work, whether it was hunting or gathering or building stuff or making clothes and all these things we do. It was the elders' job to pass on indigenous values and cultural teachings and not just that survival teaching to the youth and the elders learn from the youth too, because the youth are always the generation with new ways of thinking, new ways of doing, new ideas they want to test out, and they're keeping the elders educated on the new trends and emerging issues so that they can help direct the workers and tell, this is what we need to do this year. This is what we heard, and these are the changes we need to make. That is part of our strength and what kept us strong and breaking down those systems was part of the idea of the residential school of Christianity and conversion of TB sanatoriums and the rest.
Dev Ramsawakh:
I think about the queer and disabled elders that came before me, along with my familial ancestors and gratitude and love swells in my chest, making me feel stronger, more powerful, energized and competent. As my mind lingers on them, they materialize in my dream, armed already mid attacked as they battle the greedy tentacles of capitalism and colonialism that were wreaking havoc moments before. They are activists, although that's a label that's often applied to them rather than by them. They often see themselves only as people trying to survive who have been hacking away at the roots from before I'd even known they were there, some before I ever took a breath in this world. They attack, swinging sores and axes and maces and flails and hammers, wearing their hope and anger and love as armor. I see my mother and grandmother, their resilient and eternal love fashioned into the shields they use to try and protect their loved ones from the pain they battle. They hunker into defensive stances, weathering barrages of trauma for them.
But when their shields fail to deflect the blow, the berserker mode they pass down to me awakens from its dormancy to lay waste to the offenders. An older cousin hovers over them, wielding a purple magic staff she uses to find the weak points I'll need. The unofficial mentors and teachers that could see my power when I couldn't lay cover fire with cross bows and spears and supernatural fireballs as they try to clear obstacles and protect me from would be assailant, careening towards me from outside of my periphery. But I'm not joining the battlefield alone either. My peers, the friends I've made, the artists I've worked with are there with me. They are warriors and witches and healers, some attack directly and loudly. Others conjure spiritual magic as their weapons and others still build shields and tend to the wounded and nourish and energize us as we take turns working in shifts to allow each other to rest and recover and regroup.
They may or may not even realize that I carry them with me. Some of them may have crossed my journey momentarily while others have taken their turns carrying me, but they all find their own ways to help forge progress forward, watching organizers initiate mutual aid strategies to get food, medical supplies, masks, and other invaluable resources to the most marginalized in my community. I'm reminded of how the 504 sit-ins that happened in 1977 were described in the Netflix documentary Crypt Camp. Disabled community, led by disabled activist Judy Human who passed earlier this year, occupied federal buildings across the United States in protests of discriminatory legislation. That protest embodied both Sins Invalid principles of cross movement and cross disability solidarity as both the disabled community and the Black Civil rights group, the Black Panther Party organized caretaking systems to sustain the occupiers as they protest it, including providing food and personal support.
If I'm a leader in this battle, it's in the way that shows I watched as a child [inaudible 00:10:50], a singular unit, part of a specialized team, learning from our fumbles and power struggles while working our way up from lower level baddies to ultimate showdowns. If I end up being the one to strike the victorious blow, wielding my cane as my sword, it'll only be as the people who've loved and cared for me in their own ways, step by my side to add their own power to mine as their hands join mine in holding it. This is what Sins Invalid meant with their principle of interdependence. As Mia Minguez has written and spoken about, none of us are truly independent.
We exist in, to borrow a metaphor commonly used in the disability justice community, a network of mycelium, the hidden underground fungal threads that mushrooms sprout from, connecting them together to share their nutrients and water to keep them thriving as a single entity. But I'm looking too far ahead now. We're still fumbling and bickering and finding where we belong. This is something Julian Diego, Creative Director at Sketch Working Arts explained in an interview conducted by Martin Gomez used in the audio guide I created for the gallery exhibition called Threads of Resistance.
Julian Diego:
This city needs the creative capacities of a whole bunch of folks to be developed and shared because we need those voices because the city is facing a lot of very extreme moments. I mean, so many things that happened right now in 2022 that I used to hear about in the olden days, like pandemics, wars, civil rights battles, all these things that we used to watch on TV and be like, "I would've been one of those guys getting water hose or whatever it is.
Now's our time to find out who we would've been and who we are." Fortunately, we shift and respond, and I wouldn't hold anybody to a single moment to define how they're responding, but we're continually invited in this time, and it takes a huge amount of creativity, and there's so much wisdom in the folks that have gathered around this space that the city can actually learn from. Lessons around reciprocity, lessons around sharing space together across difference, lessons around learning from our [inaudible 00:12:48], some lessons about what it takes to listen to each other, and then so many stories from so many corners of the city and really the globe in so many ways.
Dev Ramsawakh:
Following that exhibition, I continue to have conversations with Julian, along with other current and former leadership at the organization around those lessons, more specifically around accountability, generative conflict and transformative justice. We spoke of trauma and power and the ways that they can make people we care about collateral damage on our journeys, usually perpetuating colonial cycles of violence. Many marginalized abuse survivors like trans and autistic anarchists, Lee Shevek, known as Your Militant Butch Anarchist on Twitter, have found that rates of abuse are practically directly correlated to how marginalized a person is. Don Canada and Statistics Canada report that disabled women are twice as likely to experience intimate partner abuse with likelihood increasing the more marginalized they are. For example, 71% of queer disabled women surveyed reported having experienced it, which Shevek and other survivors have argued, and my lived experience has all but confirmed the rates of interpersonal abuse often demonstrate who we value and who is disposable to us.
This is why it's important to prioritize the care and compassion that we need to show the most marginalized of our community. It's why when I began to speak out against abuse I'd experience, it's the people who seem to embody the principles of disability justice, who showed up for and supported me to a place of healing. And that's what I see in my dreams. I dream of the love that carried me from the depths of hopelessness to ground me in an almost rebellious, compassionate care. And I dream that everyone will one day experience and believe in it the way I do. These are the dreams that keep me going when the waking world waves so heavily on my shoulders. It feels as though it may finally break me.
That was part three of the six part segment series, Grounding Conversations, Returning To Care. This segment was produced by Dev Ramsawakh for Radio Lumi as part of Luminato 2023. This segment included audio excerpts from interviews with Trevor Stratton, recorded in February 2023 as part of research for an article for Vice published in April and Julian Diego, recorded by Martin Gomez and used as part of the Threads of Resistance Audio Guide produced by Dev Ramsawakh for Sketch Working Arts in the fall of 2022.
The music used in the segment is by G.R. Gritt. Sound effects were either from freesound.org or fully produced by Dev Ramsawakh.