“What is clear to me from the writings and actions of Black abolition feminists is that to eliminate the crisis of killing the Indigenous women and girls, and Two-Spirit and queer people, we need a shift in the focus of organizing from individual harm to collective and systemic change. From this perspective, we must eliminate, not reform the police. We must as, Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, change everything. We must eliminate the structures and conditions that created this crisis in the first place. We must go further than a government report designed on a macro-level to gut Indigenous resistance by gesturing towards change, but never implementing it. We need to reclaim Indigenous territoriality outside the nation-state, and to build an economy outside of the offerings of racial capitalism. We need to build an indigenous movement of ‘feminist-inflected internationalism that highlights the value of queer theories and practices.’
“We need to create the conditions where the lives of Indigenous and Black women and Two-Spirit, trans, and queer people are precious; where all living things are precious.
“Bringing the movement to end MMIWG2SQ in conversation with the work of Black abolition feminists creates a number of what-if questions, to my mind. What if Black and Indigenous families had safe housing, food, drinking water, education, and healthcare, free from anti-Indigenous racism? What if Black and Indigenous communities, both urban and reserve, had access to mental-health care from the best of both Western and Indigenous practices? What if all Black and Indigenous families had access to community-based and community-led twenty-four-hour child care programs and programs that assist parents in developing culturally appropriate parenting skills? What if we were committed to repairing the damage caused through dispossession, residential schools, and the child welfare system and regenerating Indigenous families on Indigenous terms? What if we were committed to repairing the damage of slavery and its anti-Black afterlives? What if we did this work together instead of begging the state?”
from Part Four: One Hundred Forms of Homespace by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in Rehearsals for Living by Robyn Maynard and Simpson
