Mutual Futurity: Rethinking Incommensurability between Indigenous Sovereignty and Black Freedom

Black and Indigenous Studies

The fields of Black Studies and Indigenous Studies (and Settler Colonialism Studies, which developed out of it) ¹ in the United States have developed relatively separately, despite both having defining roots in the power movements of the 1960s and ’70s. The 1968 Third World Liberation Front student strike at the University of California at Berkeley resulted in the creation of an umbrella Ethnic Studies department that included programs in both Black and Native American Studies alongside programs in Asian American Studies and Chicano Studies. But according to Clara Sue Kidwell, who has been called the ‘mother of Native American Studies programs’ (Lee, 2011), Native American Studies was the least funded of the programs and ‘became part of the Ethnic Studies Department almost as an afterthought’ (Kidwell, 2011: 27).

In this context in the United States, Indigenous Studies scholars have contended that academic discourse, including Ethnic Studies, has frequently invisibilized and marginalized Indigeneity in questions of white supremacy. For instance, much Native Studies discourse holds that movements against white supremacy in the US, including Ethnic Studies, have tended to overgeneralize anti-Black racism as the reference point for all racism, which then subordinated the specific concerns of Native Americans (Deloria, 1970), and have treated native people as entirely in the past, or ignored settler colonialism altogether (Lawrence and Dua, 2005).

Specifically, Indigenous Studies scholars argued that Ethnic Studies in general, and Black Studies in particular, tended to ignore the ways in which the primary oppression that Indigenous people faced was based on conquest and colonization of independent nations rather than oppression and exclusion based on race. Black and Ethnic Studies, they argued, tended to call for inclusion into the body politic of the United States that had systematically excluded non-white people. Indigenous framing, by contrast, made the ultimate demand of sovereignty – that is, collective self-determination apart from the United States – as redress for dispossession, rather than civil rights. To decenter this demand then, many Indigenous Studies scholars argued, was a marginalization of Indigenous movements. Indeed, Winona Stevenson calls original Native American Studies collaborations with Ethnic Studies ‘a concession . . . as a means by which Aboriginal people could get their feet into ivory tower doors’, made because of Indigenous movements’ relatively weaker and less visible position (Stevenson, 1998: 36).

However, while there has long been a preoccupation in Indigenous Studies with the ways that concerns of sovereignty are eclipsed by issues of race, until recently there was much less said by Black Studies about Native Studies. Until the publication of Frank Wilderson’s 2010 book Red, Black and White: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, there was little published on Native Studies as a field by scholars of Black Studies. This silence perhaps reiterates Native scholars’ critiques of the ways Native perspectives had been invisiblized in broader ethnic studies conversations. While Native Studies was very much concerned with the ways that they felt Black Studies dominated conversations emerging from Ethnic Studies, Black Studies seemed to pay little attention to Native Studies, as a field, at all.

Afropessimist Critiques

This changed in the 2010s as Afropessimist scholars like Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson introduced a damning critique of Native Studies – particularly its centering of sovereignty as a primary analytic – as anti-Black. Their critique was framed within a larger argument for the centrality of anti-Black oppression as the foundational system on which all other racial oppression in the United States is based, the ultimate fulcrum by which liberal humanity – and not-quite humanity – has been defined.

Sexton in particular cited his own frustration at what he perceived as an increasing centering of Indigenous struggles for decolonization in anti-racist academic discourse, which, he argued, then decentered anti-Blackness and misidentified Black presence in the Americas as settler colonialism. This, he argued, was part of a growing multicultural ‘discourse of post-racialism by diminishing or denying the significance of race in thinking about the relative structural positions of Black and non-Black populations . . . to establish the contrasting injustice of settler colonial relationships with Indigenous peoples’ (Sexton, 2016: 584).

Sexton and Wilderson’s argument for the centrality of anti-Blackness over settler colonialism went like this: Similar to settler colonialism, slavery involves genocide – mass murder, forced assimilation, and theft of language and culture. Citing Orlando Patterson, they argued that in addition to this, Black people have been particularly subjected to natal alienation – the violent and calculated severing of family and relational ties inherent to the process of slavery. This then has led to deracination – the loss of Black people’s claim to place or nation or kin. This violent breakage of ties to genealogy, place, and peoplehood is required for Black people to take on the fungibility that enslavers required – that enslaved people be evacuated of human qualities to render them available as ‘the ultimate human tool, as imprintable and disposable as the master wished’ (Patterson, 1982: 7–8). Like Indigenous people, Sexton argued, Black people have been robbed of land and sovereignty. But for him that was only a byproduct of the violence that they ultimately faced: a loss of personhood and full humanity (Sexton, 2016).

Both Sexton and Wilderson contended that ‘dynamics of Negrophobia are animated, in part, by [Indigenous Studies’] preoccupation with sovereignty’ (Sexton, 2016: 592) – that is, that Native Studies’ central demand of sovereignty is anti-Black because it is a demand that is unavailable to Black people living in the wake of chattel slavery. Native Americans, they maintain, have been able to argue for reparations of sorts, and federal legitimacy, through treaties based on at least a provisional white acceptance of sovereignty of Indigenous people. The enslavement of Black people, by contrast, has left them with no record to account for themselves collectively, or from which to make demands. That is, unlike Indigenous people, slavery and its aftermath has constructed Black people as essentially non-human, and therefore ‘without analog in the suffering dynamics of the ontologically alive’ (Wilderson, 2010: 38). Black people in the United States cannot claim sovereignty, Wilderson argues, as they cannot claim a particular land base or traditional self-governance. Given this, any politic whose claims are premised on sovereignty is anti-Black.

Sexton (2016) proposes then that slavery – and the struggle for abolition – be the central social relation from which to study both anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity:

The study of slavery is already and of necessity the study of capitalism, colonialism and settler colonialism, among other things; and the struggle for abolition is already and of necessity the struggle for the promise of communism, decolonization, and settler decolonization, among other things. Slavery is the threshold of the political world, abolition the interminable radicalization of every radical movement. (p. 592)

His vision for abolition then actually centers deracination, ‘an uprooting of the natal, the nation’ (Sexton, 2016: 593) – indeed, an uprooting of the primary bases from which Indigenous movements make claims.

In short, Afropessimist critiques, at least those that have explicitly rebuked Indigenous Studies, assert a sense that anti-Blackness more than any other oppression, has undergirded racist modernity. ² This is tied to the assertion that anti-Blackness is fundamentally more egregious than all other oppressions – and that abolition should therefore be the central political aim and analytical framework through which to examine race and modernity.

One might wonder at Sexton and Wilderson’s fixation on Indigenous Studies in particular, as opposed to, for instance, taking Chicano Studies, or a traditional field like anthropology to task. The answer to this may be revealed in their insistence in this body of work on anti-Blackness as the most central, the most foundational, the most deplorable. Arguably Indigenous Studies is representative of the other racialized group of people in the Americas who might successfully vie for these titles.

Indigenous Studies and Settler Colonialism Studies Critiques

Certainly, much Indigenous Studies and settler colonialism scholarship asserts a similar but reversed proposition: that multi-cultural anti-racism wrongly decenters anti-Indigenous genocide and settler colonialism as constitutive of the structure of American modernity and a white supremacist state. Patrick Wolfe, whose ideas are foundational to the field of settler colonialism studies, argued vigorously that settler societies are constituted first and primarily through an Indigenous/settler binary, which requires the elimination of Indigenous people, ontologies, and imaginaries. He rejected critiques of this binary as endorsements of coloniality and representative of a dilution of Indigenous demands for sovereignty that imply that this ‘original binary has become dissolved or transcended’ (Wolfe, 2013: 257). Similarly, Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd reiterates, antiracist discourses that fail to challenge the legitimacy of the colonial state by proposing inclusion also, in fact, ‘reinscribe the original colonial injury’ (Byrd, 2011: xxiii).

One of Native Studies’ most widely read pieces, Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang’s ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’, is perhaps best representative of discourse in Native Studies that roughly corresponds to that of Sexton and Wilderson’s in Afropessimism – although it is much less vehement that Black Studies specifically be decentered. Rather ‘Decolonization’ is a critique of anti-racist scholarship and activism in general as overly grounded in race-centric (as opposed to Indigenous-centric) analytics. These movements, they argue, then appropriate and metaphorize ideas from Native movements – most notably the idea of decolonization – while also decentering and invisibilizing actual Indigenous people and movements. Decolonization, they argue, cannot be used as a metaphor or as abstract liberation that can happen in the mind. If the crux of settler colonialism is land, then decolonization must also be similarly, concretely, about land.

Echoing longstanding Native Studies critiques, Tuck and Yang (2012) argue that literature by non-native anti-racist scholars that ‘gesture[s] toward Indigenous people without addressing Indigenous sovereignty or . . . unsettling/deoccupying land’ (p. 19) in fact bolsters the legitimacy of settler colonialism. Moreover, they note the ways in which anti-racist demands – the call for 40 acres and a mule for survivors of slavery, for example, which required further theft of Native land – frequently has reinscribed settler colonialism. Thus, they describe Indigenous movements’ commitment to decolonization as incommensurable with these forms of liberation because no program of authentic decolonization can imagine any kind of settler futurity.

‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’ elicited renewed critiques from Black Studies. Tapji Garba and Sara-Maria Sorentino, drawing from Sexton and Wilderson’s earlier arguments, rebuke Tuck and Yang’s centering of land decolonization as specifically excluding possibilities for Black liberation. Citing Black geographers, they note that slavery and its wake have rendered Blackness ‘a-spatial’ and metaphorical as a byproduct of the commodification of Blackness, which frames Black bodies as vessels for white desire. This includes, crucially, the expansion of spatial possibilities that the slave represented in the imagination of settlers (King, 2016). Garba and Sorentino (2020) conclude, ‘If slavery – as metaphor – is both historically and ontologically essential to settler colonial spatiality . . . it stands to reason that settler colonialism cannot be adequately theorized without metaphor: the excision of metaphor from settler colonialism is necessarily the excision of slavery’ (p. 776; emphasis in original). Tuck and Yang’s insistence on the concreteness of land, and that decolonization is not a metaphor, then, is a failure to reckon with anti-Blackness – and the centrality of anti-Blackness in the production of settler colonialism.

Their contentions echo earlier critiques of Lawrence and Dua’s ‘Decolonizing Anti-Racism’ (the piece that Sexton most explicitly rebukes in ‘The Vel of Slavery’) that argued that linking decolonization so closely with particular people belonging to specific lands amounts to a form of inflexible nationalism, and denies the wildly varying reasons people come to live on colonized lands, including enslavement and migrating from other places impacted by other colonialisms (Sharma and Wright, 2008).

Like Sexton, Garba and Sorentino conclude with the assertion that abolition – not decolonization – is the ultimate program to undermine racist modernity. However, again, this embrace requires that Indigenous people decenter – or give up altogether – the basis of their own claims to decolonization. Such a delinking would require not only an abandonment of claims to particular territories, but also an eradication of the identities and ontologies that take place through the relationship with those places.

Clearly, Native Studies as a whole is not interested in abandoning the project of sovereignty. However, the critical dilemma remains: if anti-colonial scholars hinge a rejection of settler futurity on the unequivocal demand of Indigenous land repatriation, it remains unclear what to make of Black futurity – or rather, where.

We Knew Each Other

In A Map to the Door of No Return, Dionne Brand describes a scene: Henry Louis Gates in a PBS special, interviewing a man from a prominent family in the former slave trading center of Kumasi. ‘The man across from him is Black; he might have been a descendant of a slave trader as he is a descendant of a prominent family in Kumasi . . . Suddenly, a plaintive and childish question from Henry Louis Gates: to paraphrase, “Why did you sell us?” The Kumasi man of course has no answer’ (Brand, 2001: 31).

This question is about betrayal. And betrayal requires an inkling of trust, some kind of sense of shared solidarity that has been violated. As I have read exhaustively (exhaustingly) Black studies’ and Indigenous studies’ critiques of each other, it has been hard to avoid perceiving a similar kind of dynamic. It is especially stark when scholars foreground the ways in which either Black or Indigenous people have oppressed each other: In Vel, Sexton (2016) highlights Native ownership of Black slaves (p. 558). Responding to Sexton, Glen Coulthard and Leanne Simpson pointedly note moments of Black and white solidarity in the project of Indigenous colonization, such as Bacon’s Rebellion (Coulthard and Simpson, 2016). You sold us out, each of these examples accuses. Why did you sell us out?

What these accusations avoid, at least in part, is the extremely limited set of options both Black and Indigenous people have had in the context of slavery and genocide. As Tiya Miles points out, yes, Black people participated in conquest and settlement as they fled slavery and racial terror. And the choice they faced was, in a literal sense, to either ‘make homes on Indigenous land or die’ (Miles, 2019: 422). These complicities with white supremacy and settler colonialism have been, if not forced, then certainly coerced by contexts violently controlled by white settlers. This meant that, in King’s (2019) words, ‘The terms of survival – or, said another way, the circumstances under which you as a Black or Indigenous person lived – were often tethered to the death of the Other’ (p. xi).

This is not to say that either Black or Indigenous people had no agency, that many made different choices even in similar circumstances, or that there should be no accountability for the ways any of us harm or have harmed each other. It is to say rather that any assessment of these mutual harms must hold at the forefront the deep understanding that for both Black and Indigenous people the range of options has been extremely limited by threats to their safety, humanity, dignity, families, and lives. As King (2019) argues, ‘Claims to innocence on the part of Black and Indigenous people . . . deprive Black and Indigenous life of the agonizing texture and horrific choices that often had to be (and have to be) made to survive under relations of conquest’ (p. xi).

These arguments from Black and Indigenous Studies that comprise the discourse of impasse both rebuke the other as engaged in a liberal project that ultimately supports a white supremacist and colonial state: Indigenous sovereignty relies on an anti-Black state for recognition. Black movements seek inclusion into a settler state. And of course, there are strains of thought – arguably the most mainstream in each – that indeed do take these approaches.

But in each there have also always been movements that resist assimilationist impulses, that view the white supremacist settler state as oppositional to both decolonization and Black freedom. Indeed, the strongest purveyors of these binarized positions that I have described – as well as many of the specific scholars that they critique – are representative of precisely these stances against assimilation into a racist/colonial state and society.

Sexton’s critique of Indigenous Studies, for instance, badly mischaracterizes all Indigenous claims to land and sovereignty as dependent on colonial state recognition rather than opposed to it. While there is certainly a diversity of Native perspectives on state recognition, many of the scholars that Sexton critiques specifically, such as Glen Coulthard, have spent their careers in a project to ‘reject the colonial politics of [state] recognition’ (Coulthard, 2014). As well, Native activist organizations such as Defenders of the Land and Idle No More have explicitly critiqued frameworks that rely on federal recognition and Indigenous rights as reinscribing settler state power (Defenders of the Land, Truth Campaign, and Idle No More, 2018).

Conversely, critiques of Black Studies by Indigenous Studies and settler colonialism studies scholars often overlook long radical traditions of Black movements in the United States – The Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Afrika, etc. – that have sought forms of separation from a state that they saw as inherently violent. Genealogies of Black people seeking escape from the settler state and trying to build alternatives have existed as long as enslavers sought to capture them. We can see this in maroon communities of Black escapees – sometimes formed with Indigenous people also trying to escape violent conquest, to survive, and maintain sovereignty.

Thinkers and practitioners in both Black freedom movements and Indigenous sovereignty movements have long engaged settler and racist state and institutional formations with approaches that range from wariness to outright rejection, and with a clear sense of the ways in which their own oppression has operated through these entities. And both Black and Indigenous people have long experimented with and made moves towards otherworlds – governmentalities, ontologies, institutions – that create alternatives to social structures whose foundations have been profoundly anti-Indigenous and anti-Black.

Radical Relationality on the Ground

To cope with the zero-sum analysis that these more binarized positions represent, I turned to women of color feminism and queer of color genealogies of thought that have embraced ambiguity, hybrid realities, and the generative possibilities of communities of difference.

In 1981 the revolutionary anthology This Bridge Called My Back brought together the voices of Black, Native, Chicana, and Asian American women writing on racism, colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, and heterosexism. The project was radical in its analysis and condemnation of these systems as codeterminative and interdependent, and radical in its method of cross-racial collaboration. They called themselves women of color not to flatten the differences between racial and colonial experiences (or to euphemize the word ‘Black’, as is often done more contemporarily), but rather to mark the necessity of deep relationship in order to effectively take on these systems of oppression.

In one of Bridge’s anchoring texts, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Destroy the Master’s House’, Audre Lorde outlines a path towards ending racist patriarchy by centering relationship, collaboration, and a radical seeking to understand other oppressed women who are unlike one’s self. ‘Interdependency’, she writes, ‘is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used but in order to be creative’ (Lorde, 2015: 95). Contributors like Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua highlighted the ways that working against binary thinking and knowing how to operate in spaces of ambiguity and bi/tri/multiculturality are skills that women and queer people of color have cultivated of necessity, but that also are crucial to generate creative liberatory political possibilities. The multiculturalism they wrote about was not the liberal embrace of multiculturalism as a depoliticized celebration of ‘diversity’. Rather, they describe the work and lived experience of navigating multiple specific cultural spaces, each with its own shared understanding of itself in relation to the world, and integrating/employing these varied understandings simultaneously, or variably, at different moments.

Much queer of color scholarship similarly proposes disidentification (Muñoz, 1999) – an oppositional response to dominant culture which refuses both assimilation and utopian attempts to purify oneself from it – an embracing of ambiguity and contradiction as part of queer of color strategy and culture (Reddy, 1998). Johnson (2001) cites strategies like disidentification as central to Black queer ‘technologies of self-assertion’ like voguing and snapping, calling more rigid academic theories ‘naïve essentialism’.

Even more, Black and Indigenous queer studies has deeply embraced diverse perspectives in relationship – that is, cocreation through perspectives that might be viewed as contradictory. The authors in the collection of Queer Indigenous Studies (Driskill et al., 2011), for instance, frame their quite different – even oppositional – perspectives on the basics of what the primary projects of queer Indigenous Studies might be as a conversation toward action – an ‘imagining’ and a collective process – rather than a more traditional academic framing of defense and counter-defense of theses.

As some scholars have struggled to apprehend the kinds of ambiguity and multiple truths that are inherent in thinking through Black and Indigenous oppression and colonization, political and artistic cultures with some distance from the academy have perhaps done better at reaching towards engagement through radical relationality.

For instance, Black Lives Matter activists in Detroit, Boston, and elsewhere, have incorporated calls to remove statues of Columbus – including statements of solidarity with Indigenous people – into their overall movement to remove racist monuments. This is not to say that these conversations have not been fraught, but organizations at the forefront of the contemporary Black uprising, like Black Youth Project, have consistently recentered conversations about the relationship between Blackness and Indigeneity, particularly analyses that treat settler colonialism and anti-Black racism as deeply intertwined (Ureña-Ravelo, 2017; Ziyad, 2017).

And perhaps most hopeful for those of us in the academy, the narrative of impasse between Black and Indigenous studies has led to a surge of new scholarship which views both Black and Indigenous oppression as simultaneously and co-determinatively foundational to US modernity, and which takes the self-determination of both Black and Indigenous people as crucial. Some of these projects introduce complexity, through introducing the position of immigrant and global coloniality into these conversations (Chatterjee, 2019). Many of these projects also emphasize conversation, reciprocity, and long-term relationship and project building. This is to say, increasingly, approaches that are emerging in response to impasse do so through ‘radical relationality’ (Harris, 2019).

These include a refusal to accept a futurity that decenters either Black freedom or Indigenous sovereignty, noting the ways that the binarized positioning of these struggles is itself a function of settler and anti-Black logics (Byrd, 2019; Cordis, 2019). Tiffany Lethabo King grounds this refusal in a longstanding ‘Black radical politics that I have inherited [that] cares about Native people . . . that eschews and actively resists genocide as an order of modernity and making of the human subject proper. It is a Black radical politics that proceeds and moves toward Black and Indigenous futures’ (King, 2019).

Emerging scholars of Black studies have objected to the ways that framing Blackness and Indigeneity as discrete categories is both inaccurate and diminishes political possibilities for both movements. Cordis (2019) points out the ways in which framing Black people as racialized rather than colonized is in itself anti-Black, reflecting a ‘lack of recognition of humanness, legibility, or holding any coherence as political subjects’ (p. 20). Others call on us to examine the ways that Black legacies of fugitivity also resist a settler state – and settler state of being. Fugitives from slavery, Vimalassery (2016) reminds us, were always committing a crime against colonial property regimes. Ultimately, all of these indicate ‘that freedom articulated through colonialism is not a robust freedom [and] that sovereignty expressed through racial slavery is not a useful model of sovereignty’ (Leroy, 2016).

Part of the project of many of these thinkers – both inside and outside of universities – has been to ground the work of radical relationality in communities of struggle. For instance Eve Tuck, after the publication of ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’, has engaged in an ongoing collaboration with Allison Guess and Mistinguette Smith of the Black/Land Project, emphasizing collaboration and storytelling as protective and generative: ‘When we collaborate, our stories do not belong to a researcher, whether inside or outside of the academy’ (Guess et al., 2016: 411). They highlight the ways that nonacademic ways of knowing may be more fruitful routes towards thinking our way, not only out of impasse between Black and Indigenous studies/movements, but towards the intellectual work needed to build worlds of Black and Indigenous self-determination.

Even with these efforts, many questions remain: How might we generate ambitions that are grounded in both abolition and Indigenous sovereignty? Is this possible? Can we frame and strive towards either of these in ways that do not subsume or expel the other?

My frank answer is that I do not know. And even more, I, by myself, cannot know. My intent, rather than offering a pat solution, is to urge us toward a method grounded in Audre Lorde’s foundational challenge to move towards the creative power of difference: ‘Difference . . . must be seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then can the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening’ (Lorde, 2015: 95). It is with the sense that honest and raw confrontation and also collaboration across our difference – which is always complicated by relations of power and by violences that we have committed and endured – is necessary if we are to effectively challenge the myriad forms of violence that have been killing so many of us for so long.

The projects and efforts toward radical relationality that I have described tend to acknowledge the difficulty of the task. But they take seriously the most radical of demands by both Black and Indigenous people – decolonization, freedom, collective self-determination. They do not take for granted some kind of assumed solidarity. But still they reach toward its possibility – toward the possibility of mutual futurity, and toward a sense that an end to these ongoing catastrophes requires it.

Otherwise Worlds

Leanne Simpson (2008) tells a Nishnaabeg prophesy about our time, the time of the seventh fire, where a new people, the Oshkimaadiziig, emerge to decolonize and rebuild, ‘forging new relationships with other nations by returning to original Nishnaabeg visions of peace and justice’ (p. 14). The vision requires change in our relationship to all life, human and non-human, and thus a change in economy, governance, sense of purpose, sense of right. Simpson’s aspiration echoes a stance often articulated by abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2022): ‘What does abolition require that we change? Everything.’

It’s notable that even the most aggressively binarized positions about Blackness and Indigeneity in the US, even as each argues that the other is overly invested in a racist/settler US state, reverberate with Simpson and Gilmore’s call for total system change. Both radical decolonization and radical abolition discourses argue vigorously for visions that would entirely reorder the land currently known as the United States, and indeed the world. Tuck and Yang ground their vision of decolonization in Fanon’s (1963) avowal that ‘Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder’ (p. 36). Garba and Sorentino, even as they specifically critique Tuck and Yang, call for a similar end to ontologies of racist modernity. The promise of abolition, they write, is ‘a challenge to the very structures that frame our constitution of reality’. They end their piece with the hope that the ‘productive crisis’ of the relationship between thinking about abolition and decolonization ‘may, one day, open space for the only resolution that might effectively address the problem: “the end of the world”’ (Garba and Sorentino, 2020: 778).

To approach the end of the world – which is to say to work towards the end of world structures based on racial capitalism and colonialism, and the (re)birth of new/old worlds premised on nurturing life and reciprocal relationship – we might be guided by lineages of Black and Indigenous feminist poets, who have called on us to seek synergy from contradiction.

Lorde (2015), faced with different forms of impasse between movements in the 1970s, argued that ‘Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.’ Leanne Simpson, in a call and response that spans decades and movements, nods and answers: ‘Those interstitial spaces between knowledge systems, between struggles, between theories, between our lived experiences can provide us with threads of vitality that we can use to recode and reorder the world’ (Maynard et al., 2021). Our relationships, they both say, the frictions and the synergies, are the source of generating renewed ways of being out of the ashes of conquest.

This kind of conversation is not easy, and is made more difficult by epistemological systems, academic and otherwise, that are conditioned towards conquest, dominance, and struggles for supremacy. But it is possible – Black and Indigenous people certainly have worked together towards the common cause of upending systems that are violent to both, indeed violent toward most people. This kind of synergy – and energy, strength, sense of futurity – come from the difficult work of relationality and of responsibility to each other. It is from this radical relationality that we might – we must – cultivate these new worlds.