Transcript: Dr. KIM TALLBEAR on Reviving Kinship and Sexual Abundance /157
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Ayana Young: Hey, For The Wild listeners, Ayana here. Before we dive into this week's episode, I'd like to offer my sincerest thanks to the city of Bend, Oregon for generously supporting our show. As a creative I've long turned to wild places as a source of inspiration to breathe life into my artistic process and nurture projects that will bloom in the new year. If you're seeking an opportunity to refresh your spirit and the outdoors, consider making a trip to Bend. Awe inspiring discoveries await you in the vast beauty of the Three Sisters Wilderness and the Cascade Mountain Range amidst the turning of seasons. Explore the glistening snow-capped peaks of Mount Bachelor in the winter, ride the rushing waters of the Deschutes River in the spring, or experience Cascadia's shift into autumn as the trees transform into the bright oranges and reds. We are so thankful for those who tend these wild places that make possible the important experience of reconnection, adventure, and reflection. Bend, Oregon is a member of Pledge For The Wild, a group of mountain towns committed to supporting sustainable tourism by encouraging visitors to give back to local organizations that care for these places throughout the year. Discover the majestic terrain of Bend, Oregon with your own eyes and help preserve their pristine landscapes for all by giving back at Pledgewildbend.com. That’s pledgewildbend.com.
Welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. Today I’m speaking with Dr. Kim TallBear, an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta, and the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience & Environment. She is also a Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation Fellow and the author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science.
TallBear earned her PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz History of Consciousness program, a Master’s in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a B.A. in Community Planning from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is a regular commentator in US, Canadian, and UK media outlets on issues related to Indigenous peoples, science, and technology.
Building on her research on the role of technoscience in settler colonialism, Dr. TallBear also studies the colonization of Indigenous sexuality.
Dr. Kim TallBear: I think a lot about how making small practical changes can help us think in more generous and expansive ways about who we might relate to.
Ayana Young: She co-produces with two other Indigenous women the Edmonton-based sexy storytelling show, Tipi Confessions. She is a citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate. She was raised on another Dakota reservation, that of the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe and also in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. She tweets @KimTallBear and her work can be found on her research website www.IndigenousSTS.com.
Dr. TallBear, thank you so much for joining us on For The Wild, you've been somebody I've been anticipating to speak with and I feel so connected to the way you see the world and your connections with Donna Haraway. And so I think this is going to be a really expansive and grounding conversation to have with you.
Dr. Kim TallBear: Thank you. Thanks for inviting me.
Ayana Young: So before we delve into your tremendous body of work on settler sexuality, creating kin, & the politics of genetic science, I’d like to begin with a bit of a primer on the history of monogamy. Or at least, if you could clarify for listeners how monogamous marriage really takes hold in this country in the 19th century and why we must understand the institution of marriage as a tool in settler-colonial nation-building?
Dr. Kim TallBear: So I work between the US and Canada and I'm from the United States, but I now live in Canada. I've been up here since 2015, and so I've had some opportunity to think a lot about the interconnections and the way that colonialism happened between the two nation-states, and also historically my people, Dakota people, were moving across landscapes that are now occupied by the US and Canada when that border wasn't there, right? And even post-contact Dakota, people moved into Canada because they were fleeing the US military in the 1860s, when the reservation era was really kind of in full swing. So there is a lot of back and forth, both historically and today. And a lot of lessons learned between those two countries.
So yeah, there's a lot of lessons of colonization, I think, taken between the two countries and very similar kinds of processes happen. So in the 19th century, when you see the reservation era in the US and the reserve era, really heating up in both countries, there are a lot of governmental institutions and policies that are all working in concert with one another. So colonization is a very elaborate project, right, and one really driven by the rise of the nation-state in the 19th century in North America, the civilizational project, the project was to make good citizens. “Indians” we're standing in the way of that, so you had a real drive to break up the collective Indigenous land base into private property and private allotments, and so you have what's called the allotment era and allotment policy happening in both the US and Canada in the mid to late 19th century. And so what they want to do is find a way to attach individual parcels of land to individual names, and because there had been a great decimation of Indigenous populations, you've got a real fall in population.
So there's this idea that settlers have that there's all this excess land that's going to be leftover. So what they have to do is turn the remaining Indians that haven’t died, or been massacred, into these good private property-owning citizens, and once they dissolve the collective land base into private parcels, and give, you know, 160 acres to the men who become head of household, which is not how it was many Indigenous communities, another 80 acres for the wife, 40 acres for each child. And when all of that land has been assigned to the Indians, to the individual nuclear families that they're also making, they can then disperse the excess land to settlers that are flooding in from Europe with all of its problems, that it's having right? And a sort of expelling its excess population because of the kinds of political-economic problems that they're having.
So part of dissolving the collective land base is the constitution of the nuclear family. So this is remaking and disrupting Indigenous kinship relations, which do not occur in these little heteronormative nuclear families. Part of making the nuclear family is to promote the idea of state sanctioned marriage. And so this is where you see the church and the state really working in concert with one another. A lot of times contemporary non-monogamous will say they have some vague idea that religion is the central problem. Well, religion has always worked with the state. So the state was also dead set on imposing state-sanctioned, one on one heterosexual monogamous marriage because it helped its private property goals, right? And that helped make this notion of the good citizen. And so this is happening in the mid to late 19th century. And it's not only Native people, of course, who are being forced into these hetero normative monogamous nuclear families, it's immigrants coming from other cultures that have more extended and diffuse kinship relationships that are practicing non-monogamy.
And so the Canadian historian Sarah Carter has a really interesting book on the imposition of monogamy onto Native people and other populations in Canada in the mid to late 19th century. There's another historian in the US, forgetting her name right now, but I'll come back to it who also writes about a similar kind of project in the United States. So it does happen to be women, probably self-declared feminist historians, who are writing about this project. So that's the kind of history that underlies largely what I'm talking about in my work.
There's another also influential body of thinkers that Angie Willy talks about in her book Undoing Monogamy that came out a couple of years ago. And Angie Willy, who is at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, I believe, writes about the work of sexologists in Europe at the turn of the 20th century. There's also this kind of civilizational discourse going on, right where the responsible Western enlightened civilized thinker is marrying for love. Arranged marriages are considered to be something from these less evolved cultures. And so you've got this real kind of ideology of individualism, right, and individual choice that's going along with the promotion of marriages for love, and these kinds of marriages. And so she writes a lot about how sexologists and science are also kind of central to this civilizational project that's shoving monogamy and marriage down our throat. So here, you've got the church, you've got the state, and you've got science. And these are the three broad kinds of institutions that I talk about in my work and they have always worked in concert in the colonial project.
Ayana Young: Well, to continue opening up this conversation, I’d love to share with listeners an excerpt from your blog The Critical Polyamorist, wherein you write; “At a give-away—we do them often at pow-wows—the family honors one of our own by thanking the People who jingle and shimmer in circle. They are with us. We give gifts in both generous show and as acts of faith in sufficiency. One does not future-hoard. We may lament incomplete colonial conversions, our too little bank savings. The circle, we hope, will sustain. We sustain it. Not so strange then that I decline to hoard love and another’s body for myself? I cannot have faith in scarcity. I have tried. It cut me from the circle.” Can you begin by sharing with us how the politics of marriage, sex, and family is deeply entwined to notions of scarcity and abundance? Can you speak to the sustainability that is inherently built into this sort of abundance?
Dr. Kim TallBear: Yeah you know I think when I wrote, that that's one of my hundreds, I write these 100 word creative nonfiction vignettes that are another way for me to - it's maybe a kind of ethnographic writing, but it allows for further anonymization and they're also just really generative for my thinking. I found that writing in a more poetic voice is similar to writing in a theoretical voice, it's the same kind of wordsmithing and conciseness that you're looking for in precision, so it's really a good format for writing and I think when I wrote that one I was thinking a lot about Thomas Princeton's book The Logic of Sufficiency, that came out about 10 years ago in which he argues that sufficiency should be enough, that we need to get away from this notion of constant economic growth, this is not sustainable for the world.
And I was thinking a lot about how the culture that I come from, when you look at our oral histories and the ways that we understand our ancestors lived before private property, before the disruption of our collective land holdings, to have sufficiency was enough, right? And also the fact that we moved a bit, we moved around, we migrated kind of in a circular fashion through our homelands and territories you know depending on the season and which resources we needed at which time of year, right? So there's a sort of circle that's happening and these migratory routes and of course there's visiting people along the way, but you can't be a hoarder of a whole bunch of stuff when you're moving around like that. Not that we didn't have household goods and things like that, but so i was thinking a lot about that kind of history and thinking about how that might impact the way that we think about love and family.
And we know that for Dakota people, we were a non-monogamous people. Now the church and anthropologists are very complicit in disrupting our knowledge, today, that we might have of the way that our ancestors had romantic relations as we want to think about them now or how they had sex, the kind of family forms that they lived in, right? So it's a bit hard to know all of the details of how people actually practiced their non-monogamy because this was a central target of the church in the state, right? This is a central way in which they portrayed our people as uncivilized, as savage, sexually promiscuous, you know Native women, like Black women, have been targeted for hyper-sexualization and our culture's have been viewed as promiscuous and not adhering to the kinds of civilizational standards that white supremacy likes to shove on to all of us, so there has been a bit of a loss of knowledge as well as the church really targeted sexual and family practices.
But we do know that it was possible for men to have multiple wives. We don't know to what degree those relationships were always sexual because there was a practice among Dakota people sometimes of a man marrying his wife’s sister, say if their husbands were killed or they needed to be taken care of. So you don't know to what degree a wife also was wed to this notion of sex, right? Like now we tend to think about marriage being the companionship, being the person you co-parent children with, being the person that you have a financial partnership with, and that person is also supposed to fulfill all of your sexual needs, so all of these diffuse sets of relations get objectified into this one role of wife and husband.
So we know that we have non-monogamy, we know that men could have multiple wives, we also know that the women owned the household goods and the teepee. Often men would go live with a wife's family, women had a lot of flexibility in leaving an abusive relationship, so we do have some knowledge, we don't know how sex worked necessarily. We also know that we had, maybe there are some people that have studied this more than I have, so I'm also presently trying to figure out what I can get access to in the archives. Of course, you have to read all of that through the anthropological gaze of the late 19th and early 20th century and that's kind of problematic, but we work with what we have.
We had more genders than just two, we were not a gender binary culture. Settlers also, this is well documented in the historical and anthropological record, those settler-colonial thinkers and states people really targeted people who lived outside of a gender binary. We have a term in our culture called Winkte, which is not directly mappable to LGBTQ or queer, but it's somebody who could occupy maybe a different gender role than the sex that they were born into. And many Indigenous peoples across the Americas have these multiple gender roles, right? And also engaged in what we today consider same-sex practices.
So if you have these kinds of more diffuse relations and people being responsible for the caretaking of a wider variety of relatives, and even maybe sometimes taking additional wives, because of that caretaking imperative, you can begin to see where this is a much more caretaking and sustainable culture, you do not have this notion of the individual family that is headed by this heterosexual couple, and the couple must be preserved at all costs, and so the couple in a sense becomes really fetishized, I find this really unsustainable. So couples have to stay together at all costs. We have this thing that we call a broken family or a failed family, there wasn't really that kind of concept in our culture, because there were aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins, and there were always relatives around, and we had ways of adopting relatives too. We still have adoption ceremonies to adopt non biologically related kin. So there was always this imperative to make family and make kin, there were always people around that you needed to take care of, and that could potentially help take care of you.
So when you live in a world like that, the couple is just not that important, and I think that has been placed too much at the center of what we consider a good and workable family now. And I find that really unsustainable. Look at our divorce rates, look at the unhappiness, I see this in polyamorous communities, people opening up their marriages in a desperate attempt to try and find a form of intimacy and love and connection again, and also often to save a marriage so they can keep their financial partnership and their parenting partnership intact, right? So I may have gotten away from your original question.
Ayana Young: No, I think it's all interconnected. And yeah, I mean, it's like ways of being in relationship that are not on the binary, and they're not also examples that many of us have been taught or even been aware that that could even be an option. I think that's something that this dominant culture does really well is it gives us these containers and if you don't fit into those containers, not only are you rejected in a way, but you're also not given the space to even imagine that there are ways to live outside of these very narrow ways of relating to one another. So just hearing you I'm like, “Whoa, okay, what would it be like? How would that feel? What are other options to be in relationship with others that are healthy and regenerative?” And I’m really interested in delving deeper into our understanding of intimacy when it comes to decolonizing sexuality. Specifically, what forms of intimacy, and even intercourse, do we shut ourselves off from when we abide by the objectification of sex or sexuality? How is expanding our understanding of consensual intimacy, with all forms of community, a part of disrupting what you articulate as settler sex and the family structure?
Dr. Kim TallBear: Part of what I want to do in my work, and maybe this is getting at what you're saying, I really want to focus on sex and sexuality because I want us to blow it apart and get beyond it, stop fetishizing it, stop objectifying it, and stop putting it on a shelf. It's like some precious China that can only be touched under certain circumstances, right? Certain very rigid circumstances, or it must be hidden away and protected. Why is there even this concept of virginity? Give me a break. You know, how is that even a thing? I mean, fine, don't have sex. But why do we have to name it and call it a thing that has to be protected? Right? It's really strange. I mean, I know why people do it, but there is this sort of misogyny that's behind that. So in thinking about blowing apart sex as a thing, I think what I want us to do is to realize that it's one way of relating.
So one of the sets of people that I've been learning a lot from, that have been making me think a lot in the last few years are asexual polyamorists or just asexual people in general. A lot of the asexual polyamorous I meet, I mean obviously I meet them at conferences and things, they have multiple forms of intimacy and love, like I have as somebody who's not asexual, but they don't necessarily have to have what we consider genital sex, right, or the various forms of “sex”, they don't have to have that necessarily as part of their intimacy, it doesn't mean that they don't fall in love, it doesn't mean that they don't like cuddling or touch or need those kinds of relating. And sometimes they might even have sex, but it's not necessarily the same driver that it is for a lot of us. So they have actually just really taught me a lot about being in good relation and what that might look like and you know, sex can be one form of intimacy. But so is conversations, so is cuddling, so is looking into each other's eyes, so is sharing resources, you know, so was talking to one another, kindly listening to one another, reassuring one another, sex can be one among many ways of relating, and I think if we come to look at it in that way, we can understand that we might want to be sharing it instead of hoarding it and we can focus more on consent, right? The sex is something that I think we can have in abundance. And what's really important is, is it possible to have it in this kind of consensual, mutually desired way?
Ayana Young: Yeah, I'm really interested in learning more from you just now about the asexual polyamorous, because I think a lot about my personal relationships with people, and there's a lot of times where folks will feel more than maybe just a friend, but we're also not in a type of marriage relationship, and we're also not having intercourse, but we do have romance and intimacy and so much love and so much sharing with one another. And there isn't a term in this culture, and maybe that's a good thing, that describes what we have. And it's kind of hard to explain to folks who aren't willing to shed those old identities when I try to explain how I relate to people in a way that isn't so rigid. And so yeah, I think you really spoke to all of those things. And it's interesting specifically with polyamory because it's inherently over-sexualized in this dominant society where everything has turned into sex. So I'm also curious to hear how expanding our intimacy plays a role in combating this hyper-sexualization of relationships beyond monogamy.
Dr. Kim TallBear: You know, polyamorous a lot of times are really trying to combat this idea that it's all about the sex right? Because while many polyamorists love sex, including myself, you know, it is obviously not what it's all about, especially since we have asexual polyamorous, right? So, again, I think, if we can look at sex as just one more way of relating, and it's appropriate with some people and not appropriate with others, but I think we could expand the categories of who it's appropriate with beyond what we have, right? And this is partly what polyamorous are trying to do with non-monogamy.
So I think a lot about how making small practical changes can help us think in more generous and expansive ways about who we might relate to. So we talk a lot in polyamorous communities about the terms that we give our significant others right, as we're trying to mess with categories and get away from rigid categorizations. And so I tend to settle on the terms, you know, sweetie, or I was thinking the other day about people that are lovely to me with the word love being part of that. So when I think about who my sweeties are, well, my number one, sweetie is my daughter. I just love her so much. And she's so fun. And we have so much fun together. And we laugh so much together, but my other sweeties are the people that I have intimate sexual relationships with. And then I have very good friends. And you were getting at that a little bit ago, I have friends whereas I've expanded my notions of what counts as polyamory and multiple relating, I definitely have friends where it's always resting on what would previously have been a border between platonic and romantic. But if I do away with that border, again, these are people with whom it is appropriate to have consensual perhaps sexual relations, right?
I feel like having a more expansive category or name to call people is really helpful in not getting hung up on is this romantic? Or is this platonic? Right? Again, I always come back to consent and who is it appropriate to relate within which particular form? And if I'm focusing on that I don't need to focus on is this a real relationship? Is this romantic? Is this platonic? Are we ”just friends?” I can't stand that term, just friends, right? Friends are family, friends are central. It is such an important, sustaining relationship. Don't ever say just friends, unless you mean to denigrate that relationship, right? And that's what a lot of us are trying to get away from who are practicing polyamory in a more critical way. And that would often also disproportionately include queer people. I think there's a lot of straight people who are still doing polyamory in a way that Alexis Shotwell calls monogamy on steroids.
Ayana Young: Yeah, I really appreciate that. What you're saying about just friends and we make these relationships in a way less important by the language we use, because maybe we feel like we can't use different language because maybe that's not appropriate and the way that we've learned how we can “appropriately” relate to people.
And, you know, just reading a lot of your work, I understand that we cannot talk about intimacy without talking about relations, and for our listeners, I’d love to quote directly from your essay “Making Love and Relations: Beyond Settler Sex and Family” from Making Kin Not Population, where you write; “How does the different sustenance I gain from multiple lovers collectively fortify me and make me more available to contribute in the world? If I am richly fed, what and who am I able to feed? What is possible with a model in which love and relations are not considered scarce objects to be hoarded and protected, but which proliferate beyond the confines of the socially constituted couple and nuclear family?” Can you share how everyone involved in a non-nuclear family or a beyond monogamous relationship has much to gain from being in relation to one another? And to kind of move into another offshoot of this question, I'd love to talk about what we can learn from earthly relations in terms of non-monogamy, or perhaps more specifically delve into the topic of ecosexuality. And so often it really feels like conversations on ecosexuality are really stymied, in large part because I'm not even sure that the English language is equipped to discuss it in full fruition. So I'm wondering, does ecosexuality inform your work? And if so, what do you define as ecosexuality?
Dr. Kim TallBear: Well, you know, I'm pretty close friends with Elizabeth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, who are some of the more well-known ecosexual performance artists out there. And I've been thinking with Beth and Annie since 2012, when I still lived in the Bay Area and they invited me to the Dyke March one day where they marched under the ecosexual banner. It was really, it was so funny. There were some young people at the Dyke March, who were just like, what, who wants to do that? So, but it's been really generative for me. It's not my thing, but because I care about them as friends so much, and because we're just in great conversation, right? And we have a lot of affection for one another. I've been thinking generatively with them since 2012, and thinking about why is this interesting to me, eco-sexuality as a term, but why doesn't it work for me? And I came to the conclusion pretty early on, even before I started theorizing why the word sex doesn't work for me, that it's just growing up as a Dakota person, as an Indigenous person, we already have ways of thinking about being in relation with our other than human relatives, right? In fact, in Dakota language, it's built into the language to think about nonhumans as your relatives and as your kin, as nations or persons as peoples, you know, we don't have a human non-human divide built into the language and a hierarchy in the same way that one has in English, that one has to speak to generally in Western thought.
So I can see where people who are not coming out of an Indigenous language and framework in history like me, need something like ecosexuality, some people might. So that's what was my initial thoughts. And then I also follow the work of somebody like Melissa Nelson, who's an Anishinabe professor at San Francisco State, and Melissa is also in conversation with Beth and Annie, and ecosexuality and Melissa writes about Indigenous eco erotics. And so she's also working with the work of Audre Lorde.
So there's a lot of thinkers out there that are giving us multiple kinds of languages that we might want to sit with and think with. So definitely, I'm in conversation with eco-sexuals. But because I'm so focused on pushing through sex, to disaggregate it back into relations, I wouldn't necessarily use the terminology of ecosexuality in my own work. But I am comfortable having a conversation with eco-sexuals. And trying to find, I don't know, common ground upon which we can maybe speak slightly differently about the kind of work that we're trying to do in terms of really paying attention to our intimate relationships with our nonhuman relatives. And those can take many different forms. So one of my Ph.D. advisors was Donna Haraway, and so a lot of her other students were also really into human-dog relations. Well, I am not like that, you know, those are not the relations that I pay attention to, the relations that I pay attention to, are sort of my orientation on the prairies, I need flat land and big sky, mountains jostle me around, I'm agitated and uncomfortable in mountains, I'm agitated and uncomfortable near the ocean. It's not that those are the wrong landscapes, but they're not my formative landscapes. They're not my near and dear relatives in the same way. I really, really, really need to be on the prairies for a significant amount of time. And a lot of that has to do with the ratio of land to sky. It's got to do with the violence and the tumultuousness of the skies. I need to have storms, you know, I need to have just the kind of personality and topography that the prairie has, both land and sky. And so those are the relations that make me feel at home. Now. I could write about that as a form of ecosexuality like Beth and Annie do, you know they talk about cloudgasms, but I don't need to do it in quite that way. There's other language that I can draw on.
Ayana Young: Now I’d like to acknowledge the inherent pronatalism that is built into the church & state’s advocacy for monogamous marriage. You often speak frankly and candidly of the sort of “oppressive force” of the settler family structure and I’m hoping you can share some of your thinking about shedding heteronormative biological reproduction and what forms of bonding and kinship await outside of the dominant nuclear family structure?
Dr. Kim TallBear: Yeah, you know, I have written and talked about this a lot, and I try to be careful because, you know, I have people that are really close to me that are implicated in these conversations, right, in particular, my own daughter and my co-parent, as individuals are implicated in anything I say publicly. And so, but I have written about this a lot. Donna Haraway writes on this as well, I think there are some, I just don't think everybody should biologically procreate. I don't think everybody should have children. And I think the pressure on us, especially as women to bear children, the way this identity of mother is forced on to us as something that we should aspire to, or there's something wrong with us is so violent, and it produces so many children that are, you know, I think about, you know, I'm not one of those people that ever had a biological drive to reproduce.
And I know there are people like that, no matter their gender, my cis-gendered ex-husband had a strong, strong desire to have a child. Why? Because he wanted to love and caretake that child, that's probably a good reason to have a child, right? Like, he just wanted a person to love and caretake. And so, you know, because I had the uterus, and he didn't, I did it. But I laid down a set of conditions because I never aspired to be a mother and I had nieces and nephews who I just adored and spoiled. And I was raised by a great grandmother, who completely adored and spoiled me, it's not that I knew I wouldn't have that kind of orientation to a baby. But it just wasn't the drive that I had to be a mother. And so but because I had such a dedicated, loving co-parent, I was able to, I didn't mean to do an experiment, but in a sense, it was an experiment, right? We brought this human being into the world. And I've been able to think with that all these years, you know, and I really do think about the choice that people should have, but not just, it's not just about individual choice, either, because, you know, we can fight for individual choice, right? We can fight for reproductive rights, but the broader choice is really hampered in our society by this term mother. I prefer the term caretaker, because there's all this baggage that goes along with “I'm a mother, I identify as a mother, what kind of mother are you?”
You know so I think it's really good to again get away from that kind of individualistic identity, those individual expectations, to be thinking more about how we raise these human beings, these little humans in community, right? And again, my culture does that. The mother, in some sense, is not always essential once she gives birth to that child, is not always essential as the grandmothers are. And often the auntie's are, there are always those people that kind of step in quite often and do that work.
So every single child that one brings into this world, there's a cost, there's a cost. And so you need to really be thinking about that, right? And so every new grandchild of my mother's that comes into the world, in one sense, you can say, “Oh, this child's really a blessing. They're each a unique and unique individual human being, and they're very much loved.” But don't think that there's no cost to that, you know, because there's limited time, there's limited material resources, and you need to pay attention to that cost. And so, I've really been able to sit and think with that. I mean, I would, you know, obviously, as many parents would say, most all parents would say, I would lay down my life for my child, as you would for any human being that you love that much. But I don't act like there is no cost to bringing another human being into the world. And I really do sit with that and think with that, and I lament that I try to do more. I'm trying to do things for my nieces and nephews, but I know that I don't do as much as I could, because I put such a huge amount of resources into my own child, as one is expected to as a middle-class parent, right? 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of dollars, you know how expensive that is? So yeah, I mean, the middle class, right? I know poor people are sitting out there thinking please, right? You know, my child has so much that I didn't have so much.
Ayana Young: Yeah, no, there's so much to consider when bringing a child into this world and the resources it takes to raise a human and to be a human, especially in this modern dominant culture. And I think, yeah, I mean, it's just mandatory for us to think through these things when we're questioning if we're going to bring a child into this world. And I know people can feel triggered by that, and talking about childbirth and what it means to be a parent. But if we're not willing to talk about carrying capacity, and you know, the resources that we'll be using, and like you said, not just physical resources, resources about our time, and how that can create resentment or frustration or a feeling of unfulfillment. I mean, these are things that really we should be talking about in the community, where we feel like we have the space and the trust to be able to share these fears and concerns and processes. Because I do think in this culture, it's kind of like this faux pas and even talk in this way. But then it's like, wait, how are we not going to talk about these things when we're about to bring another human being into this world like this feels really important. So I really appreciate you going into this and now another theme that I've been picking up in your writing and really fallen in love with is the way you articulate what we might understand as conceptual time travel. In “Making Love and Relations: Beyond Settler Sex and Family,” you write: “As I try to write this, I engage in essentially nonsensical conceptual time travel with categories that will lose their integrity if I try to teleport them back or forward in time. So much has gone dormant—will go dormant. So much has been imposed onto Indigenous peoples, both heteronormative settler sexuality categories and now also “queer” categories.” I can’t help but feel this might be something that many can relate to. Can you share with us how disaggregation provides an alternative to hierarchal categorization, wherein power is conceived a new? How is this deeply connected to the need for different languages?
Dr. Kim TallBear: Okay, the thinking about the disaggregating, so I have a section in my Making Kin, Not Population chapter from that book edited by Adele Clark and Donna Haraway, where I cite David Delgado Shorter, and the section of my chapter is called Disaggregating Sexuality and Spirituality and Re-Aggregating Relations. And Shorter says, and I quote him, “Sexuality is not like power, sexuality is a form of power, and of the forms of power, sexuality might prove uniquely efficacious in both individual and collective healing. Further, I will suggest that sexualities power might be forceful enough to soothe the pains of colonization, and the scars of internal colonization.” And he talks about in that piece, about not getting caught in a sort of sexual identity or categories, as if it's always in forever, and it's unchanging. The way that we relate to other humans “sexually” has a lot to do with who we are and who they are in relation to one another. And it's not that we don't have dominant desires. And of course, there's a lot of social construction, I think, to our desires. And I've seen that moving from being a monogamous person to a non-monogamous person, I have really been able to use my own body and sexual practices as a site of experimentation and observation, whoa, have my desires changed. It's not that I've completely changed. But as I've been more open to more greater data, right? Since I've been open to more partners, and to a wider variety of partners who have different kinds of desires and different kinds of sexualities, I've come really to realize in my own relationships, as a site of experimentation and observation, how much more multiple and diverse my desires are, how much more multiple and diverse I am, and it's really about who I'm relating to, and what we're building together versus am I, this, am I that.
And I get the strategic advantage, we need categories, I was talking to a trans friend of mine one time, and I said something really clueless, like, you know, I said, “Oh why can't we just love one another? Right? Like, why do we have to be in these kinds of categories?” And my friend said, Kim, you sound like one of those white people who's like, why do we have to see race? I was like, you're right. I was really clueless. So there's a strategic advantage to it, you know, we have to have these racial categories and our sexuality categories, and all of that, all of that, because we're advocating for rights, we're advocating for justice. we're advocating for resources. You know, there's that practical way. But I think there's this other kind of strategy we can have, right, which is to think in these ways about how we are relating to people as individuals and who are we relating to and how are we then reconstituting ourselves in relationship to one another? So that's kind of where I've come to both through my own experimentation in my own life through reading, through reading theory like David Shorter talks about.
In terms of the conceptual time travel, of course, as I thought historically about Dakota people and how they lusted, loved and made kin, I've had to think about how do I even talk about this in writing, you know, when I've got this set of English language, settler-colonial categories, you know, straightness, and queerness, and all of the LGBTQI, you know, kind of ecosexuality, all those kinds of terms which I have to work with, but transporting those into the deep past. I mean, you know, it's, it's hard for us to talk about that, you know, are you going to talk about in the 1500s, and Indigenous people in what's now called South America were they “gay”, no I mean, they've had people that we would now call cis-gendered men probably having sex with one another. But it's just, it's so difficult to talk about these things when you're using a language that did not belong to those people when you're using kind of hierarchies and standards of civilization that did not belong to those people. So you do the best that you can. But I am not a fan of unproblematically transporting contemporary categories of sexuality into the past or necessarily on to other cultures, that have their own terms, in their own languages, for how they are relating to one another, and may not have had these kinds of discrete objects called sexuality at all. Does that make sense?
Ayana Young: Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Well, I know we could continue on pulling the threads of this topic. But I’d like to turn to another facet of your work, which is thinking about Indigenous erasure in terms of appropriation of identity, or what you refer to as “representational assault.” There are so many different ways to approach this conversation, whether it’s Native American mascots, the popular claim of Cherokee ancestry, or the inability to acknowledge stolen lands...but an area that I’d really like to ask you about is how you see this happening in terms of genetic science and it’s commodification. How does the growing market for genetic-based ancestry tests reflect the United States’ necessity for Indigenous DNA? How is this appropriation in pursuit of multiculturalism a form of erasure?
Dr. Kim TallBear: I think largely the human population genetics research that happens within the academy and other research institutions, and then its commercialization in the form of genetic ancestry testing, those tests that you see advertised on television and on the internet, and you can buy on the internet. Both the academic research and the commercial project are really trading heavily in this notion of the vanishing Native, the disappearing Indian. And that is a motif that's been around, I think, I mean, really, since the beginning of colonization. The Dakota historian Phil Deloria, who's at Harvard now, went there from Michigan a few years ago, has a book published in 1998, called Playing Indian, which traces that history. Now Deloria doesn’t talk at all about DNA in that book, he’s really looking at the rise of Native American mascots, of the role-playing of Indians in fraternal orders, and the Boy Scouts and the New Age movement. But those things are all related to the way that the genetic ancestry testing industry and academic research also take up this notion of vanishing Indian. And so the Indian must always be vanishing, D.H. Lawrence wrote about this and Phil Deloria quotes him in that book; “ the Indian must be vanishing, because until the Indian vanishes, the American project is an incomplete project.”
It produces too much cognitive dissonance to have Indigenous people alive and well in the center of your country that is built upon, in part Indigenous genocide. And so there's this constant need to disappear us, you know, constantly in the mascot issue and appropriating Native identity as part of disappearing us “Oh, they don't exist anymore. There are so few Natives around, you know, nobody really cares. There's nobody to be offended by this mascot issue, who's really offended? Just these lefty liberal social justice warriors. There are no real Native people offended by this.” You know, the fact that people will walk around saying they have a Cherokee princess great-grandmother without even thinking about it means they probably don't think there are any actual Cherokee people in the room to dispute what they're saying.
But the thing is, Native people are everywhere. Don't open your mouth and say something ridiculous about Native people when you're off sitting in some cafe in Boston, because chances are there's some tribal person sitting around you, we're still here. So there is just this need to produce this kind of stereotypical you know, in a headdress stereotype of a prairie Indigenous person from the 19th century I mean, the fact that people don't when you talk about a Native person, you know, you talk about a “Sioux” or a “Cherokee” or whatever, what comes into your head? Does a guy in a business suit working as a tribal attorney come into your head? Does an incredible basketball player or athlete come into your head? Does a college professor come into your head? No, probably what comes into your head is a Pocahontas stereotype or a Plain’s chief stereotype, right? And that tells you that people think we are only in the past, we don't really exist anymore. And those motifs still get taken up in the service of people making claims now through DNA and so I don't see a lot of difference between dressing up as an Indian at a Redskins game and what Elizabeth Warren was doing, these are both appropriating an Indigenous representation based on this kind of implicit or unstated idea that we're really not around very much anymore, that we really are this 19th-century relic, this image of the American past that can be used to shore up the sort of historical claims of the US and Canada.
Ayana Young: Mm-hmm. I really appreciate how you provide a thoughtful critique of the multicultural state as nothing more than a mere tolerance that solidifies the nation-state and liberal settler society...I also know that for many, the critique of multiculturalism will hit hard, because it confronts what so many of us have thought to be enough for far too long, yet what you situate as an alternative is being in good relation and making kin with Indigenous communities. Can you share with us how kinship can be an alternative to liberal multiculturalism?
Dr. Kim TallBear: Well, if you're advocating multiculturalism, incorporation into whose project? You know, like just the assumption that the US or Canadian project are the good projects, we didn't ask to be incorporated into you all, and African people were kidnapped, you know, and brought over and forced into this kind of citizenship project as well, eventually. And then we're all supposed to clamor for acceptance and belonging and incorporation into this, gimme a break.
You know, meanwhile, you've got this sort of, especially in the case of the US, this militaristic, violent, contaminating state going around the world, you know, killing people, producing environmental conditions that are decimating non-human populations. And so the civilizational project of the state is inherently violent, and multiculturalism is not going to get us out of that. What we want to rainbow up the US militaristic Empire? That doesn't sound great to me, it doesn't sound great to a lot of people around the world as inclusive as you might get within the US. That's excluding a whole lot of people. And it's, of course, on the backs of a lot of non-human relatives.
So I'm a critic of patriotism and all of its forms, I don't care if it's a right-wing, patriotism, or if it's one of these liberal multicultural patriotisms, I can't stand it when you have democrats who think they're on the left talking about being a different kind of patriot, being a patriot is not a good thing. Your love should not be dedicated to the nation-state, it should be dedicated to your relatives. And if you are in favor of patriotism, to the US, you are acting against the planet, you are acting against all of your relations. And I don't think that's a very ethical stance to take. So I don't embrace multiculturalism, I just don't know, I realize there are pragmatic people who will say, well, there's a pragmatic kind of argument, one can make sure you go ahead and do that. But there's also this kind of macro-level argument that some of the rest of us are also attempting to make.
So my allegiance is to the planet, right? I just can't have allegiance to a nation-state. I cannot because it just excludes too many people. And so I think multiculturalism is still kind of not examining the allegiance to the nation-state. And you see this in particular in Canada, where it views itself as the more ethical, gentle alternative to that big bad, militaristic power to the north, right. and Canadian multiculturalism is held up as this better alternative to what they perceive as a greater racism in the United States. But I don't really see it that way. Because it's still this assumption of making a colonial state that's based on an appropriation of Indigenous homelands, you know, making that more multicultural.
Ayana Young: Well, in closing Kim, I’d love to end with a question on how you are putting many of these thoughts, abstractions, and questions into practice, which is to say, not focusing on the solutions or the goals, but exercising the abstract in different projects of yours like Tipi Confessions or RELAB. Can you share with us how these performances, storytellings, and creative practices are so vital to the work of unsettling?
Dr. Kim TallBear: So I was largely doing, you know, Indigenous Science, Technology and Society work for the last 10 years. But I used to do spoken word before I went to graduate school and it was just a side thing, right and then I've probably incorporated a lot of performance just into my academic stuff. I like to be on stage. And I like to give talks and I like to perform in some sense. And those things kind of really came back together in the last few years, we just by chance, started the Tipi Confessions Sexy Storytelling show in Edmonton. It's an offshoot of the Austin, Texas-based show Bedpost Confessions, which has been around since about 2010, and we did it for an event, an Indigenous masculinities conference, the Tipi Confession show back in 2015, and it came off so successfully that people asked if we would do another one. And we asked the women at Bedpost Confessions, the producers there could we make this a regular thing? And they said, Yeah, they would love that.
So we do an Indigenized sexy storytelling show. We've also got an Indigenous burlesque troupe that has been an offshoot of our show. So a lot of different threads just kind of came together serendipitously, it seems. And there's so much happening in Edmonton and across Canada, around decolonial sexualities and Indigenous sexualities. We've got multiple Indigenous burlesque groups, we've got Indigenous queer and Two Spirit people who are thinking a lot about human land relations and what we might call Indigenous eco erotics, although that might not be the term that they use. People thinking about defending sex worker rights, people thinking about tying the exploitation of Indigenous land and its decimation and violation to the assaults on Indigenous women, right? And so there's a lot of human-non-human connections that are happening implicitly in the decolonial sexualities and in the kind of sexuality rights stuff that's happening across Canada, and across Indigenous communities in the US.
And so Tipi Confessions happened at a really great time where we talk openly and positively about sex and sexuality. But we also have moments that are really moving where people talk about overcoming sexual trauma and getting to a place of positive sexuality. And we are really clear in our show, even though it's fun, and we laugh a lot. And we have a lot of salacious, sexy stories that we are an important part of what we're trying to do is to recuperate Indigenous sexuality after it has been such a target of the church, the state, and science, they have demeaned Indigenous bodies, demeaned Indigenous communities, portrayed us as sexual deviants, all in their civilizing colonial project. And part of us recapturing sexuality for ourselves and pushing through is to get us back into the sense of being in good relation. And so it's why I talk about sex and sexuality as one way of being in good relation. It's not necessarily the only way or the best way, or the most privileged way, some people don't want to have sex, that's fine. All of us relate to other people, whether we do it sexually or non sexually. And so we're at the center of our show, and then at the center of our broader Arts Based Research Group, which we've called the RELAB, is to think about being in good relation.
And so we decided to call our group RELAB because we always noticed we were using re-words, restory, research, reclaim, resurgence, you know, think about all the re-words you can, and these were kind of coming up in a lot of our work. And so we decided to do Tipi Confessions, to do Indigenous burlesque, we could also work some kind of environmental work into this broader research group. We just had a symposium this fall, where we had a presentation by a graduate student here at the University of Alberta, who's working on hide tanning as a form of cultural resurgence and revitalization and making good relation. How do you make good relations among women and people that are doing hide tanning? What are the Indigenous protocols for having good relations with the animals who are giving their bodies you know, and so what we're finding is even though we're trying to get away from the words nature and sexuality within the RELAB, when we're talking about restoring, researching, and reclaiming Indigenous relations and non-human relations, our projects tend to be about “sex and nature.” And that's what we're doing in that research lab right now, and Tipi Confessions the show is only one part of that. There's a lot of other graduate student projects that are happening and can happen through that research group at the University of Alberta.
Ayana Young: Oh Kim, you just inspired me to ask one more question because you got my motor going again, I know you often cite how decolonization is not solely an individual choice, it requires collective opposition of a system. And now more than ever, we are really in the midst of the collapse of American society...I’d love to ask how working with intimacy and sexuality as an entry point to being in relation, encourages us to find ways outside of the colonial structure in a manner that is embodied? How does this individual act still contribute to the collective opposition of an unsustainable worldview?
Dr. Kim TallBear: Yes, decolonization is not an individual act. So I paid really close attention to how we define decolonization and we can't just use it to mean any kind of social justice project or any kind of opposition. Decolonization is about giving land back. It's about restoring Indigenous land and life. You can't get around that if you really want to do that work. So part of doing that I think, thinking about being in good relation is who are we relating to and how? So a lot of times when Indigenous people talk about land back and decolonization, and I'm thinking particularly about what Eve Tuck and Wang Yang write in their article Decolonization is Not a Metaphor, again it’s about the restoration of Indigenous land and life, and that doesn’t mean that you’re asking everybody to leave. See, settler-colonial thought always assumes that Indigenous people, that decolonization means that we're going to do to other people, what was done to us, that's not the case, right? If you're promoting being in good relation, it's not only developing relations with us as Indigenous peoples as First Peoples, but it's also about developing your relationships with this place, right.
And so I think learning how to relate with one another, and I do emphasize good relations, but they're not always good relations, you know, we don't always get it right. We try to get it less wrong, as Donna Haraway says, or Sandra Harding says, you know, we're not about being right, we're about being less wrong. And the way you are less wrong is by trying and trying again, right and, and try in the actual practice of relating and figuring things out with one another. So our sexual relations can be part of that. But I think it's really a focus on relations more broadly. But I think that's, I think that's only part of what you're asking. But so that's kind of what I mean, when I'm talking about decolonization, people throw the word around a lot. And I think people should be clear that what we mean is that something has to be restored, we can't just all agree to get along, there actually has to be a transfer of resources, right. And resources is a problematic word. But that's the word we're working within English, you know, we're actually talking about relatives. I mean, if you look at the statistics, they show that the greatest amount of biodiversity happens to be in Indigenous lands, right, there is an important tie between Indigenous worldviews and ontologies and protecting our non-human relatives on this planet. Those are important ties, those relationships between Indigenous peoples, and our historic homelands should not be violated, they should be cultivated, and other non-Indigenous peoples should come into cultivating those relations with us. That's what we need to figure out how to do, right.
And there are a lot of other thinkers that are much farther along than I am in terms of thinking about how we do this work. I'm thinking of Indigenous environmental thinkers and activists all over the world, right? People that are actively thinking about how to restore those relations, we've got a lot of people and lands now occupied by Canada, Indigenous and non-Indigenous allies who are thinking about doing land-based education and land-based projects. There's a lot of that going on up here. That student I was talking about who's doing the hide tanning workshops as part of the work that she does, too. So there are people thinking on the ground about how to actually put these forms of better relating into place, I tend to theorize about that kind of work. Did I touch on everything you asked?
Ayana Young: You touched on so much in this entire interview. And I feel like I'm gonna need a lot of time to sit with our conversation because we were able to span so many different topics and give space to these concepts. Because I think especially in this culture, we're so used to clickbait or just this instant gratification or swipe culture. We're just like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, headline. Okay. Next, next, next next,” but everything we talked about, there's no next, it's sit and stay and listen and breathe and really try to take it all in because it's in the fabric of these lies that we've been told since the moment we were born, and maybe even before that. So yeah, it's a whole shattering of this dominant identity.
Dr. Kim TallBear: I mean they are justifications for extraction, right? You can call them lies versus truth, but they’re justifications for extracting, they’re justifications for hierarchy. And if we don't want to live in a hierarchical extractive world, we've got to find justifications for not doing that. Right. So it's funny, we were talking before we started recording about the truth, right, and you saying that you heard truth in what I was writing, I mean, it's not that I don't have more research to do, right, I have more observations to make. I have more archival work to do. But for me, the truth is not in some kind of form of ultimate transparent truth about the universe. I don't believe in that. I don't know that to be how the world works. To me, the truth is in our intentions to connect, and in our intentions to relate with one another and I think as long as we keep focused on that intention we will sometimes get it less right than we could get it, right? And this is what I was saying I think I've learned from Donna Haraway and Sandra Harding and other feminists epistemologists that we're not trying to substitute some other you know great feminist truth for the great white masculine as truth we're trying to get it less wrong and the way that we get it less wrong the way that we have a more textured and nuanced understanding of what's working in the world and how is by relating to one another by having multiple eyes and minds thinking together on how to live in this world differently right? And how do we stop justifying extraction and hierarchy and so that's what I’m trying to do and so if that's what if my intention is to relate and to justify living well together then there's room for me to misstep a little bit and not quite get it right so that that's what I’m trying to do.
You know I know that I sometimes I use the wrong words some of the things that I really fight against are, I fight a lot against ableism in my language and gender binary-ism because that's so deeply embedded - you know I don't have as much trouble with racist language because my mom had me working on that from the time before I could read, she was very anti-racist but these other things I have to work on, right? And I continue to work on them and sometimes I mess up but it's by staying there in conversation that I’m going to get it less wrong as time goes on.
Ayana Young: That's a good lesson for all of us to take away from this too is how to keep striving to be less wrong but realizing that we're all going to be making mistakes and the language that we've been given in this dominant culture doesn't come close to the issues that we're really trying to get to the heart of so Kim this has been such an expansive and exciting and challenging conversation. I've really enjoyed all of the twists and turns that we have gone down together and I hope to have another conversation in the future because I know this is just the beginning and we've just barely scratched the surface of the depth of your work so thank you for sharing this time with us today
Dr. Kim TallBear: Oh you're welcome thank you.
Ayana Young: Thank you for listening to another episode of For The Wild Podcast. I’m Ayana Young, the music you heard today was from M83, Frazey Ford, and Frase. I’d like to thank our podcast production team Andrew Storrs, Carter Lou McElroy, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Melanie Younger. If you haven't already, please rate us on Itunes, sign up for our newsletter at forthewild.world and become a member on Patreon thanks again and until next week.