This week we welcome social activist and public speaker, Patty Krawec. Patty is an Anishinaabe woman of the Lac Seul First Nation. She hosts (along with Kerry Goring) the podcast Medicine for the Resistance—which looks at the similar experiences of Indigenous and black lives.
Patty also uses social media to speak about Indigenous realities in Canada and the United States. For many Indigenous peoples, social media has changed how families and friends interact with each other. Not surprisingly, Patty shares some fascinating insights.
What should everyone know about #NativeTwitter and Indigenous social media?
How does social media affect self-sovereign identities in an Indigenous context?
How important is it for Indigenous communities to own their digital identities?
Join us as we further examine social media’s benefits and challenges.
This week we welcome social activist and public speaker, Patty Krawec. Patty is an Anishinaabe woman of the Lac Seul First Nation. She hosts (along with Kerry Goring) the podcast Medicine for the Resistance—which looks at the similar experiences of Indigenous and black lives.
Patty also uses social media to speak about Indigenous realities in Canada and the United States. For many Indigenous peoples, social media has changed how families and friends interact with each other. Not surprisingly, Patty shares some fascinating insights.
What should everyone know about #NativeTwitter and Indigenous social media?
How does social media affect self-sovereign identities in an Indigenous context?
How important is it for Indigenous communities to own their digital identities?
Join us as we further examine social media’s benefits and challenges.
Henry : Hey everyone, it's Henry, Mike, and Chris of The Decentralists and we are absolutely thrilled to bring you a special episode today, it's called Social Media and its Effect on Indigenous Populations. With us is Patty Krawec, she's an Anishnaabe woman from Lac Seul First Nation, Ontario, now living in Niagara Falls; she's a social activist and podcaster on Medicine for the Resistance. Recently awarded the tongue-in-cheek disorder of Canada by Cree writer, Paul Seesequasis; Patty can often be heard on social media speaking out about indigenous realities in Canada and the United States.
She believes that none of us exist independently, rather we all live in layers of relationships and the question that drives Patty's activism is how can we live in good relationships with one another, Patty, welcome to The Decentralists.
Patty Krawec: Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Mike : Welcome, Patty.
Chris : Welcome.
Henry : I'd like to start with what seems like a very simple question, but in reality, I've learned that it is not. What do we mean when we use the term indigenous populations, Patty?
Patty Krawec: Yeah, that's a layered word, like any catchall it's going to be a problem because we are no more cohesive an identity in the Americas than Europeans are but we're seen that way when we're called indigenous populations, we're seen as kind of this monolith and we really aren't, no more than there's a singular European or African or Asian identity.
Mike : That's really interesting.
Patty Krawec: Yeah, and when we talk about indigenous, when we say indigenous peoples, mostly our minds turn to Canada and the US, and we start thinking about Plains Indians and other people like that, kind of living in Canada and the US. But we forget about the Inuit, we forget about the Mate, we forget about indigenous populations throughout Central and South America, but there are also indigenous populations in Europe, like the Sami, for example, that are circumpolar people.
And throughout Russia and the British, there are no indigenous people in Britain that's just a big thing that's happening on Twitter right now, people insisting that they're indigenous, no, Britain got colonized a very long time ago. So, when we talk about indigenous peoples, for the most part, when I use the term today, I'm going to be talking very specifically about Canada and the US because that's my base of knowledge, that's kind of my broad community but we have to also think of it globally.
So, when I think of indigenous, I'm thinking about mostly land-based people who are living kind of in resistance to people who had moved into their area. So, I don't know, like the Ukrainians might be considered an indigenous people that were experiencing the colonization by Russia, although that's my maternal side of the family, I really don't know enough about that to be able to say that definitively but when I think of indigenous people globally, I'm thinking about land-based people kind of within our current modern period of experienced colonialism.
Mike : What I found the most fascinating part of what you just said, and it's something that literally has not occurred to me to this point. Is I think that if I look at say a certain, you said that when you refer to indigenous populations when people refer to indigenous populations that they're essentially referring to just a lump kind of group of populations, everybody is under the same umbrella. And yet when the European populations, it's funny, I have these conversations with my American friends and generally, I think that if you walk around the United States and you ask, just pick somebody off the street, a stranger, and you say, so what are you?
Meaning, what kind of origin are you? They'll say I'm American and if you were to do the same thing in Canada, they would say, oh, I'm Italian, or I'm Ukrainian or I'm Dutch or whatever, we've both have similar kind of immigrant population bases yet in one case it's more homogenous than the other. But I find that this is very fascinating that people don't think of the different kinds of indigenous population groups as unique and it must be something that to a certain extent, it provides a greater amount of say solidarity, shall we say? But on the other side, it also probably is very easy to get lost in this, to lose your independent cultural identity.
Patty Krawec: Well, I think that like everything that's indigenous it's complicated because I'm from Northwest, my dad's side of the family is Northwestern, Ontario, so although I'm Anishnaabe and kind of within that broader umbrella, you have the smaller groups, like the Mississauga, the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Chippewa, Asaulto, like we're all Anishnaabe, kind of like, you have Great Britain and you have England, Ireland, all those other countries, that's a very bad analogy, but it kind of works.
But we're more Oji-Cree because there was so much back and forth between the two communities that we actually developed our own language, but also through residential schools and adoptions and stuff like that, you also have people that are Lakota and Salish and something else and something else and yet they're still indigenous. But what nation do they belong to in terms of thinking about, because even our needs are different, we have some similarities in terms of our relationship to Canada and how we experienced colonialism, but that's very different. And so, solutions that the Mi’kmaq might be chasing in one area might not be what the Wet'suwet'en are chasing and then people will say, oh, well you need to speak with one voice, well, no.
Mike : No, you don't, you're exactly right but it's almost like you get forced into that, kind of a conversation, right?
Patty Krawec: Yeah, and then in Canada, we have the Assembly of First Nations that started off as an advocacy group and then has really gotten badly co-opted by the government, and yet they're our official voice.
Henry : Interesting.
Patty Krawec: Yeah, I don't know what a similar organization would be in the US, I don't think that there is kind of a broad national group that the US deals with the way Canada deals with the Assembly of First Nations.
Mike : Well, it would probably be, I guess, a lobbying group or something like that, that's generally how people kind of politically organize.
Patty Krawec: Yeah, and I do think that there is kind of a broad American lobby group for indigenous people the way that there is in Canada.
Chris : Patty, it's interesting that you say all this because maybe one of the words I would come to describe all this is Byzantine. Lots and lots of organizations, some of them are open, some of them might be opaque and it's not always easy to keep track of everything that goes on which is why I personally find social media to be very beneficial. And that's why I think that social media can be very useful for people who pay attention to indigenous issues. Why don't you tell us a little bit about what should everyone know about native Twitter and indigenous social media?
Patty Krawec: Oh gosh, native Twitter, well, people should know that we argue a lot, not having a coherent voice, oh my God.
Henry : Who doesn't?
Patty Krawec: There are a couple of really good accounts that people should follow; one is at indigenousXCA, there's indigenousX which is an Aboriginal indigenous account in Australia and indigenousXCA is the Canadian version of it and they have rotating hosts, every week you get a new host and so it kind of exposes you to the diversity that is native Twitter.
Henry : Oh, wow.
Mike : That's awesome.
Patty Krawec: Yeah, those are a couple of really good accounts for people that are just kind of interested in trying to find us and then that's how you find other people because they retweet things and engage with people. And it's a good way to get a really broad overview of who we are because there's native academic Twitter, which is academic researchers and those are the ones that I focus most of my energy on in terms of following. But there's also black indigenous Twitter, which there are a lot of voices that are really getting loud in terms of the fact that there are Afro indigenous people, not just in the sense that people from Africa are indigenous in their own right but also that we didn't just intermarry with Europeans.
So, Afro indigenous people exist and that's an important part of native Twitter and also there's two-spirit native Twitter, which is another important community and people to listen to because that's a community that's finding its feet, not only in the broader society but just in the indigenous community because that's someplace where colonialism has really done a number on first nation communities. In Canada, we have smaller communities that are called variously, they're banned or first nation and that's pretty interchangeable, we have very small land bases compared to some of the giant reservations that you guys have in the US.
Chris : Patty, just to clarify something because some of our listeners may have never heard the term two-spirit before. What is a two-spirit person?
Patty Krawec: Yeah, a spirit is something that was coined in the early nineties to capture what it means to be gay or queer in indigenous contexts, it's more a way of understanding it, so literally having two spirits inhabit you, so you have the male and the female in that and it's seen as a gift to the community. We never had that kind of male, female binary that European Christians love so much, gender was much more fluid, gender roles were much more fluid and as long as you were contributing to the community, we really didn't care how you lived your life.
Henry : It's fascinating because I've actually heard of other communities across the globe, indigenous communities who feel exactly the same way.
Patty Krawec: But not everybody who's gay, LGBTQ, even in indigenous communities will say that they're two-spirit, that also has kind of a particular, I don't want to say ceremonial but it's also a specific community role if you're going to be two-spirit, so yeah, it's complicated, like everything, but two-spirit is generally referring to queer spaces.
Chris : So, social media has given people an opportunity to connect and a lot of people are getting heard for the very first time, that's awesome. Patty, what are the caveats to social media in an indigenous context?
Patty Krawec: Well, it's kind of limited and it's two dimensional, so we can get our information out there, we can do like on Facebook, there are digital check-ins to kind of raise awareness, the Mi'kmaq were using that when things were really going squirrely out east, they were using that as a way of directing attention to a specific geography, so that's good. But it's also people can scroll on by and it's not necessarily that effective and it's very, I don't know, I just finished Nora Loreto's book about Take Back The Fight, which is a really good book on feminism, but it has so many broader applications in terms of the ways that we organize.
And within social media, there's no, as I said, it's two dimensional, so there's no structure within which to hammer out ideas, we can do it and we often do it, but we're doing it in a public space that invites trolls. For somebody who has as many followers as I do, I only have one dedicated troll, and I'm kind of excited about that but I only have one, it's like, I've watched other friends and their social media just blow up so badly and I only have one, but he's fairly dedicated, deliberately misunderstanding.
Maybe I'm giving him too much credit, but just deliberately misunderstanding and twisting things that I say, so that I wind up, it's a way of derailing the conversation into what he wants to talk about. And so, although we're able to get information out there and that's really good, the information can also kind of get deliberately skewed, and then when media reports on it, which is kind of a way of solidifying the conversation because it gets out in global news or CTV, or kind of whoever's covering it and it gets written down and analyzed in a way that makes it concrete.
It gets misrepresented, we don't control that information once it lands that way, and then there's also the matter of the hierarchy, the blue check Indians, the celebrity Indians whose information gets more weight. People go to them and you kind of get media cherry-picking who they're going to get information from and they're the ones that are controlling the narrative and not always from a good place because they're about building numbers and building their own brands.
Chris : Just to give an example of something that you're talking about, Patty, I remember that there was, her exact name kind of escapes me at the moment, but there was an Inuit woman who shared a picture of her child right beside a seal that was hunted. And as soon as she shared that on Twitter, her social feed was exploded by a bunch of vegans who are yelling at her because she won't go vegan and when I read that, I'm like, well, okay, what kind of vegetables can you grow in the arctic.
Patty Krawec: If only we listened to white vegans, man, we'd be setting up greenhouses there and life would be so much better.
Chris : Yeah, but just right there, that's one of the risks that you have being on social is that, Hey, you want to share a precious family moment with people who you're close to and, sooner rather than later, you get it ended by a bunch of people who you'd rather not have a conversation with.
Patty Krawec: And that's the problem with not having on-the-ground relationships with people because for a white Southern vegan, there are so many options, why would you need to kill a seal? Why would you have to do that? And why would you take a picture of your child beside that? They just don't understand because they don't have any kind of on-the-ground relationships with people outside of their geography and I've been to Iqaluit, my son lived up there and he worked up there for 18 months and we went to go visit him. It's an entirely inconceivably different place, my mind was blown by how completely, like, there's nothing there, there's absolutely no reason for people to be there other than government industry.
And it's a very fragile ecosystem, the liken that grows is so tiny, how is it going to support anything? So, part of that is that we just lack relationships, like real on the ground relationships that temper our understanding, so when Tanya posts that picture, I've been there, I have other Inuit friends, I have a big context for that, I understand, so my view on it is much different from somebody who lacks those relationships.
Mike : Right, if you look at kind of the promise of a social media, especially for I'm going to say isolated communities, small towns, people that live in areas that aren't as accessible, you don't have the same kind of resources, you mentioned Iqaluit, you don't have things like big public libraries and all of this. So, you have this internet, this social media thing, whereas long as you have a pipe, you can access resources that were previously unavailable, which is a great thing. But part of the challenge that you have with things like social media and the structure of the way that the internet works now is that essentially it forces us all to be homogenous because there's only one interface like the Facebook newsfeed looks the same for me as for somebody else.
So, the only way that you could kind of I guess, fight that homogeneity is when you're standing on your soapbox, you change your message or you yell louder, or you get more kind of contentious. And so, I guess what I'm trying to figure out is, to me, there is a lot of benefit to being able to say, connect isolated communities, which I think is probably more the norm in a lot of the indigenous communities around the world. And that's just a result of what was forced on them by colonialization, let's say, but taking that positive and then throwing in this negative, which is pushing them all into this homogeneity that we started this kind of thread with, which one do you think, are they kind of 50/50, is it more a benefit or more of a negative?
Patty Krawec: What's really interesting, so there are some, there's K-Net, which is a broadband network that's up in Northwestern, Ontario, it was created by the Northern chiefs, it connects the isolated communities up there. And when we talk about things being isolated or remote, we need to think about isolated from what, remote from what, remote to what, they might be remote to Ottawa, but they're not remote to their homes, these are their homes, we're the ones that are remote.
Mike : Right, that's very interesting, good thought.
Patty Krawec: Yeah, so we need to think about how we use and hear those things but they are geographically isolated for sure. And to throw them into say Twitter or Facebook without really any safety net, I guess you could say, that would be really disorienting because it's a much different world when you're living up there and you're watching The Cosby Show or something, wow that really aged me.
Henry : No, I get it, yeah.
Mike : Totally.
Patty Krawec: Right, what we see as a normal way of living and what we see reflected on TV, although that's really not very normal, we get this idea that it's normal, it's much different but K-Net, is a more enclosed space, it's kind of like Myspace for Northern Indians. So, what they're able to do, and the interesting thing, I found some research on that, which was done by Heather Molyneaux and some others it's called Social Media in Remote First Nation Communities. And they found that it was really helpful, particularly because they had on the ground relationships and then they had these social media relationships that worked together, so working together to preserve language to learn language, to connect with elders, and hear stories.
Storytelling is so important to humans in general, I think that this quarantine time has really shown that we're just storytelling creatures, all of us, whether it's Netflix or The Mandalorian, or kind of whatever, we're surviving on stories, and it’s not just indigenous peoples. And stories tell us how to live in the world, how to exist as people, how to live in relationships with other people, what do you do when you meet strangers? What do you do when you come across these different circumstances, movies and stories, tell us how to do that and what to expect.
And so, when you're in these artificially created communities, which is what these bands and first nations are, they're artificially created communities, for decades were in forced isolation that allows them to communicate with people that are basically relatives to share these stories, but in a way where they're not getting personal trolls, to come in and derail their conversations. And the research has shown that that kind of connection, where they have the on-the-ground relationship to put context to the larger conversations that they're having is super helpful.
And it provides a kind of social foundation, social safety net, the better you feel about yourself, the more confident you are as a valuable indigenous person, seeing your identity as valued and important and connected to the geography around you, the more you have to be able to withstand kind of the crap that broader social media throws at you. In terms of the trolls and even just, like right now, there's this nonsense conversation, thank you, Erin O'Toole, about how the early architects of the residential school system had good intentions, no, they did not.
Henry : Yeah, no kidding.
Mike : Exactly.
Patty Krawec: Except that for a lot of people, civilizing indigenous people into a western way of thinking, they would see that as a good intention. And if you have to separate families to do it, well, that's what Child Welfare's been doing for a hundred years, so obviously we think that's a good idea too.
Chris : I think that something that is often not said, Patty, is that a sizeable portion of indigenous populations, they're urban, right?
Patty Krawec: Yeah, some 80% of us.
Chris : Exactly and some of them have never even stepped foot on a reserve or reservation in their life, and social media also gives them an opportunity to talk with folks who live lives that are quite different from their own. Winnipeg has a pretty sizeable indigenous population.
Patty Krawec: The Urban Res, people often refer to Winnipeg as The Urban Res.
Chris : And this kind of leads into another question because you can't say indigenous without also considering implications for sovereignty. What are your thoughts about indigenous sovereignty and social media?
Patty Krawec: Well, I think that examples like K-Net and firstmile.ca is another resource that kind of connects these things because who owns social media, when we talk about sovereignty we're talking about who's in charge and how things are controlled. And so, when we talk about social media, we have to look at who owns it, Facebook, Twitter, I don't know who owns Tumblr, somebody owns Tumblr, I still don't understand how that works.
Mike : Some American corporation I'm sure.
Patty Krawec: Yeah, some American corporation owns it and the government, I just learned a new phrase today, and I'm so excited that I have a chance to use it because it totally fits the associated state. I'm reading a book right now about Southern labor and one of the essays talks about the associated state and how the government uses private industry basically to expand their reach. So, the example that they were using was industry and how government contracts two places like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, allowing them to control labor and kind of the broader social community around these factories.
And it works like that in social media too because the government can reach in through regulatory processes and other things, it reaches into Facebook and Twitter and everything that kind of starts up as soon as it starts accepting public money or government money, or even just through regulations that starts to control the algorithms and whose posts get seen, whose posts get taken down, how being put in Facebook jail or Twitter jail works in terms of complaints. We've seen that quite often on Twitter where native activists defending themselves against white supremacist arguments.
Mike : They're the ones that are getting banned.
Patty Krawec: Well, they're the ones that are getting banned or shadowbanned, and meanwhile, the ones who started it are skating off just like in school, you fight back against the bully and you're the one who gets detention.
Mike : Well, it's happened to us, we've been kind of talking and literally to a very, very tiny, almost insignificant audience but talking about issues that people need to think about. The thing about the trolls and, you mentioned being excited about having your troll, well, we got our first piece of hate mail last week or two weeks ago, you know what I mean?
Patty Krawec: Excited that I only have one, not that I have one just that I only have one.
Mike : Well, it's almost like, you have the little fuzzy green hair and you want to make sure that he stays under the bridge with a smiley face on and stuff but it's one of these things, where I kind of, to your point about kind of outside authorities, exercising control, you have almost like two layers that you have to crawl out from underneath with social media nowadays, hell even three. You have the garden variety, I've always argued for years now that the thing that's disappeared on social media, by giving everybody a soapbox, there's no dialogue anymore because it's basically one-way communication, you post something and your troll and everybody else who decides can just go back and gang tackle you.
So, there's no, well, Hey, this is an opinion, please come back with an enlightened opinion on your end, let's have a debate and maybe you'll change my mind, which is where progress comes from. So, you would say that especially, so first, you have that piece, then you have another layer on top of that, which are these corporate entities and their algorithms, which determine who sees your efforts to engage in an enlightened dialogue. And now you have on top of that, you have a government depending on, especially when you think about as it would relate to say indigenous populations and say the issue of unsolved or unresolved land claims has potentially a hidden agenda.
Patty Krawec: Well, not so hidden.
Mike : When they go to regulate social media, so you almost kind of feel like, geez, how do you fight out of the futility? It sounds like your First Mile and K-Net are unbelievably awesome, and at least starts to get out of this thing.
Patty Krawec: Well, and that's where recognizing that social media can be a tool, but isn't the tool is important because, through social media, I have gotten access to people I would never have access to in my normal day-to-day life, most of whom are academics that I really look up to but I don't travel in those circles in my day-to-day life. So, I would have no access to them to be able to have conversations with them and I use social media very intentionally in terms of who I follow and who I unfollow, making liberal use of blocking and muting.
But it also has some limitations and having structures to have conversations in is really important because that's like rules of engagement and specific goals that we want to work towards because I can go on social media and shout about land back all day long, that's not going to push the government in the direction that it needs to go. The government needs legitimate organizations and by legitimate and by legitimate I mean kind of coherent, existing organizations that people form to push back and we're constantly reforming and evolving organizations because you win a couple of battles and then you promise that you're going to come back for people that you left behind in order to win these particular battles and you don't, your focus starts being on maintaining this little ground that you've won. And you forget that there's this whole bigger thing happening and that's what happened with the assembly [Cross-Talking].
Henry : And that's politics.
Patty Krawec: Yeah, and so we need these constant new generations coming up and picking up the fight again and listening to them because you're right, that's politics, we learn to get along, we learn to build relationships, and then our focus starts to shift. And like you see this constantly in the whole history of labor organizing and civil rights organizing, the new generation is always seen as kind of a little too radical for the older ones but that's so important because the older ones we forget that the generation before us thought that we were awfully radical.
So, and there is something that I see in indigenous communities, particularly because we're also a very young population, we're probably the fastest-growing demographic under 40 or something like that, it's ridiculous how young the indigenous populations are now. And that's so amazing because that means that we have to listen to them, there's too many of them to shut down, and they're smart, they know how to use social media and they know how to be connected to their geography, and they want to be connected. I've only been home a couple of times, Lac Seul is outside of Sioux Lookout, which is actually where that research that I cited about K-Net, was done in Sioux Lookout, I've only been home a few times, it's a long way from here.
My son has been up more often, he's a little more mobile than I am but his generation, they're the ones that are going home and sitting with the elders and learning stuff and that's exactly the way that it should be, the young ones being with the elders while the adults are out paying the bills.
Henry : That's amazing.
Patty Krawec: That's exactly the way that our communities worked historically; the young ones with the old ones while the middle ones were out doing stuff and it's so exciting to see that because they're also really smart about social media, I think that they're a lot smarter about it than I am. They're smart about how to use it and how to connect it with on the ground relationships, not just with people, but with land and animals and they see things in a holistic way that is really important and there are just too many of them so we have to listen to them, we don't really have a choice.
Chris : So, one thing that I also want to mention here is visibility on social media and to give kind of a broader context here. Hollywood hasn't been very kind when it comes to indigenous representation and to kind of give an example of this, one of the most famous so-called Indian actors Iron Eyes Cody of the crying Indian fame.
Patty Krawec: That one tear, that single tear.
Chris : Exactly, he wasn't even native, he was actually Italian and that's just how Hollywood has always treated indigenous folk.
Patty Krawec: Yes, and can I tell you a funny story about that ad?
Chris : Absolutely, tell us.
Patty Krawec: That ad was part of a corporate strategy to shift responsibility from pollution from corporations to individuals and they used the idea of the noble savage to do it.
Henry : Wow.
Patty Krawec: And ads that were just so terrible and as you pointed out, they didn't even have the decency to hire one of us.
Mike : Totally, Patty, you have to think that there's a special place in hell for those folks, seriously, what a disgrace.
Chris : So, Hollywood has not given indigenous populations very good representation, hell, the news hasn't done it either, we saw that with the last election where Navajo was referred to as something else. But there is kind of a few things that are quite exciting and that's that a few indigenous folks have gotten some visibility on social and to this end I just kind of want to discuss Nathan Apodaca who did the dreams cranberry juice video. He's this year's breakout social media star that little video increased sales of Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice, and put Fleetwood Mac on the billboard charts for the first time in decades.
Patty Krawec: And he got a free truck.
Chris : Yeah, he did.
Patty Krawec: Ocean Spray bought him a truck, so he is kind of a really interesting character because yeah, he's got some real res uncle vibe, just kind of being really chill and I think that a lot of indigenous people saw themselves in him. He is himself an indigenous person and it's been such a hellscape of a year, decade, and century and to see him just being so chill and it's such a great tune, it was just such a really nice moment, but he's anti-black. So, then you go through his other videos and he's rapping because his whole jam thing is singing along with stuff and he's rapping along with something and he uses the N-word with the hard G and it's like, no, not even if you're singing along, no.
Henry : Really?
Patty Krawec: Yeah, not our word, you don't say it ever, there's no circumstance where it's okay, maybe he didn't know, he gets told and he comes out with the whole, I don't see colour and I didn't mean anything by it and just like the whole white supremacy nonsense about why it's okay to be like that. And so, the black community and the black Afro indigenous community were just, okay, so that's not okay, we could forgive the fact that you did it, maybe you didn't know any better, but when you got corrected, you doubled down in the same way that the white supremacists do, so that's not okay.
And then when you start talking about that, you get shut down very quickly, I actually got unfriended by somebody on Facebook over that because I understand this dude's anti-black, please don't be holding him up like some kind of indigenous hero because he's anti-black and that's something that we need to deal with in our community so that we have a history of it and it makes sense. I understand where it came from, but we have to deal with it and we have to root it out and get rid of it because these are our relatives and I got unfriended over that.
And I didn't shed any tears over that, but we're just so hungry for recognition that we're not always good critical thinkers about what that recognition is and somebody made a comment that I just thought was so was so accurate, it was, representation is not justice. We can be represented in film, but if the story's not right, we can be represented in political spaces and media spaces but if they're not telling indigenous stories from an indigenous perspective in ways that relieve oppression or confront oppression, if they're doing it in a way that upholds the settler state, that's not justice. So, representation isn't and that's native Twitter too not all native Twitter exists to challenge the colonial state, some of us are deeply invested in it, some of us are cops.
Chris : So, just to ask you, would you say that some of this visibility might be smoke and mirrors?
Patty Krawec: Yeah, because it becomes visibility for visibility's sake and what does that accomplish?
Henry : Yeah, exactly.
Mike : Right, so let me ask you a question, Patty, you talked about this young generation and is kind of going back to their elders and kind of starting to reengage with the community and things like this. But on the other hand, there's still part of a young generation that is also, depending on where you look, the young generation has also pretty much usually been viewed as politically disconnected at the same time. It's hard to take those 18 to 30s and get them to vote or to kind of do things that kind of become, let's say more active things.
So, what would you say or how would you encourage say the young indigenous community to kind of step in and develop that kind of reengagement into a kind of a political force, shall we say for indigenous communities?
Patty Krawec: Yeah, I think that we have to separate voting and political engagement, they're not the same, we think of political engagement like voting and I think that you're right, that they're very disengaged from voting and I'm going to lay that at Trudeau's feet because we came out hard for him the first time around. Indigenous communities really across Canada came out very hard for Trudeau, we mobilized the vote, we stomped for him, really came out very hard for him, and boy did he let us down hard.
And so, he didn't see the same kind of turnout in his reelection and he paid for that, and he's trying to work his way back and we're all like, yeah, we don't care about you anymore but in terms of political engagement, in Ontario, we have Doug Ford doing all kinds of dumb things. And it was an indigenous student in Ontario who organized those school walkouts and they were enormously successful in terms of forcing the Ford government to back off his, I think that it was largely over the sex-ed curriculum, there were a number of other issues as well.
And that was a young two-spirit person and they were very connected, the school in terms of building relationships with the different schools, it wasn't like with the general strike that a couple of journalists called for on Facebook, that's not how you organize a general strike. This young person had the relationships, each school did it in their own way, they organized almost in a cell structure and it was enormously successful, so when I see indigenous youth who are getting engaged, that's what's happening is that there are issues that they engage around and they do have the numbers and the connections and the ability to make relationships on and offline with people that matter.
And they were successful and we need some long-term staying power, we need to connect the various movements into something that's going to be coherent over time because every time that you win concessions, those concessions are very vulnerable, they're only as good as your ongoing pressure. So, I see a lot of that kind of important activism, like I have a podcast, every fool with a computer has a podcast, but they're using them in really important ways and I think that's their smartness in how they're doing that, so they're organizing in really good ways.
Henry : That's a great example.
Mike : That is a great example. Patty, well, the first thing is, you have to tell me how I get a disorder in Canada because I totally want one.
Patty Krawec: Paul handed out a whole bunch of them one day on Twitter, you know how people used to do follow Friday, those kinds of things where it's just, these are the voices that you should follow. I think that it was something like that; there were a whole bunch of us that he awarded the disorder of Twitter.
Mike : Should make up little pins and everything, you know what I mean, that would be awesome.
Patty Krawec: I have told him to do that, he was laughing because I put it in my bio.
Mike : That's awesome, that is so great, so I appreciate that. So next, let's talk about Medicine for the Resistance, so that's your podcast, and what is Medicine for the Resistance? It sounds awesome; it's a great name by the way.
Patty Krawec: Well, the very long story is that I met my co-host, Kerry Goring, through work, and every time that I went out to visit her and her grandkids, our conversations would always go sideways into race, Kerry's black from the Caribbean, her family is from the West Indies and then came to Canada via England. And I had been challenged at this conference as a social worker to talk to my clients about race because it's not a surprise to us that we're black or indigenous, we know that we are so bringing it up, isn't going to be all that surprising.
But as social workers, we need to know how they move through the world, and even as indigenous people don't always move through the world the same way. I'm quite fortunate, I have a university degree, I'm married to a white guy, I own my own house; so I move through the world much differently than other indigenous people, even in my own local community, let alone my home reserve. So, it's important for me at the time that I was a social worker to ask those questions, what is it like for you at school? How do you experience work and all of these things?
So, all of my conversations with Kerry went sideways into race, and I didn't even know how I was going to document these conversations because we didn't talk about the things that we were supposed to, but we thought we were hilarious and the way that we had these conversations, we crack each other up. And so, we were approached by the Niagara Podcaster's network to do kind of a social justice round table with other podcasts that they had on their network and we agreed and then took over and did our own thing and wound up going independent which basically, just means that we do all our own work, which is really sad because it's a lot of work.
Mike : We have Henry to do it.
Patty Krawec: Yeah, thanks Henry, anyway, so we realized very quickly that if we were going to talk about black and indigenous issues because we have so much common ground we don't all always have the same experiences and we don't always have the same specific goals, but our overall goals of individual and communal sovereignty in terms of our individual identities as black and indigenous people.
But also, we have collective identities, when people hear that I'm indigenous, there's this kind of collective umbrella that comes with that and there's a community that I am part of just by virtue of being indigenous, whether I want to be part of that community or not, I am, so this individual identity and then this kind of collective identity that everybody has. So, we get a lot of guests on and it's really just kind of whatever interests me at the moment, half of the time it's somebody who will say something intriguing on Twitter and I'll say, Hey, we need to talk about this and a lot of times we're looking at history and we've talked with a lot of historians about what's gone on historically and how that matters now.
Because like the civil rights era and the dental school era, these aren't like discreet pieces of history, they're overlapped, my grandma who just passed a few months ago, she was born in 1919, and so her life connected all of these things in one person. So, when we say, well, that was the times, when people were so racist in the sixties and seventies, well guess who's running corporates now, the people who were screaming at black high school students coming into their school, they're in charge now, so that wasn't like way back then, those people are still in charge, still hiring police officers, still running governments.
Anyway, so the idea of Medicine for the Resistance is that we wanted to provide something, our target audience was those that are pushing back against the colonial state, against colonial ideas, against kind of colonial presence in their schools and in their lives. And we wanted to be able to give them something to strengthen them so that when they go into these spaces, they'll be able to stand up and they'll know who they are because when, I asked Kerry how she protects her grandchildren from racism in their schools because the neighbourhood that she lives in is basically, an all-white school, her kids are like the only black kids in that school.
And she said that she can't, what she does is she strengthens them, knowing who their family is, knowing the story of their family, knowing kind of the power of who they are so that when they hear nonsense out of their textbooks or out of their classmates, they have something to withstand that and so that's what we wanted to provide. Now, surprisingly, a lot of white people, a lot of settlers listen to my show and that really surprises me because that's not our target audience, so we're not code-switching in any way in order to try to accommodate white fragility but they like it, so what are you going to do?
Henry : Well, it's educational for people like us.
Patty Krawec: I just love the feedback that I get, was a lot of, wow I never knew that, and half of the time I feel exactly the same way, our guests will say something and I'll be like, wow I never thought of it like that. So, that's amazing, people are listening to me learn out loud, it's great.
Chris : Patty, something that I think is important for everybody to acknowledge whether you're indigenous or not, is that none of us are who governments or corporations tell us that we are exactly right. So, I don't think the likes of Canada or the US or Facebook or Google, I don't think that they have a right to own our identities.
Patty Krawec: No.
Chris : Sadly, that's what's going on with social media at the moment. One thing that I wanted to ask you is how important do you feel is digital identity to sovereignty?
Patty Krawec: I think that it matters, but it's not everything, it matters how people see me on Facebook and Twitter is intentional in terms of the things that I talk about and it's that on the ground identity in my community that really matters, those are the people. And especially right now, when we're isolated in our homes, I live in a city of 70, 80,000 people, but I don't see any of them unless I'm picking up my groceries, so it's really easy to kind of get that endorphin shot of social media engagement and think that's a relationship. But I have a women's drum group that I'm part of and we can't meet right now because singing is really one of those things that's not good.
Henry : Right.
Mike : Right.
Patty Krawec: Great, from the virus' point of view, but not from the people who don't want to get sick, point of view, so we shouldn't be gathering and singing, so that's really hard and we're struggling to maintain those relationships in the same way because that's what matters and that's where organizing really happens. Social media is really a way of learning out loud and trying ideas and seeing if I can defend ideas because sometimes things I think, aren't necessarily as defensible as I think I am and I learned that very quickly on social media, I have people that will tell me where I'm wrong and I try to listen to them.
But the actual social change that we need in terms of controlling our identity as a very mixed community here in Niagara, that's not what's happening on social media and I think that's okay.
Chris : This goes back to what you were saying about relationships, right?
Patty Krawec: Yeah.
Chris : None of us exist independently; a lot of things about who we are depend upon our relationships.
Patty Krawec: Yeah, we live in that space between us, I don't live completely on my own, my identity is in all those spaces in between me and other people and social media is part of that, but it's really not all of it.
Henry : Patty, that's absolutely fascinating, we traveled through so many topics, I didn't really expect that today, but there are so many more, I would love to chat with you about in the future. I don't know, maybe we can do this again if you have the time, but I have to thank you for joining Mike and Chris, and myself on The Decentralists today.
Mike : Yeah, Patty, it's been fantastic, I've learned so much, thank you, for sharing your insight and your outlooks, it's been incredible.
Patty Krawec: Thank you so much for having me, I loved it, you guys are almost as funny as me and Kerry.
Henry : Well, no, we're not that good.
Mike : We try; we're even funnier looking, so that's very good.
Henry : Did you notice that we don't have any video, Patty, there's a reason for that.
Patty Krawec: And I'm more than happy to come back because I love talking.
Henry : Thank you.
Mike : Thanks, Patty.
Chris : Thank you so much, Patty.