In this episode, youth researchers (ages 14 to 18) and graduate facilitators from the afterschool land education program, Youth Dreaming and Designing Relations to Lands and Waters, reflect on climate justice and Land relations, focusing on the impacts of colonization, urbanization, and gentrification on both human and more-than-human beings. Through rants, poems, and stories, they challenge anthropocentrism, express desires for more reciprocal relations with Land and water in the city, and envision just climate futures for their communities. This episode was originally recorded in the summer of 2024.

We’d like to thank and celebrate the Afro-Indigenous, Black, and Indigenous youth researchers for their contributions to the land education program and podcast: Aadehwiin, Alyssia, Joanna, Judah, Lucas, Sterling, and Waeys. Thank you to the researchers in the Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab who co-designed and co-facilitated the program, under the supervision of Dr. Eve Tuck and Dr. Fikile Nxumalo: JP Craig, Jade Nixon, Nicole Franklin, Milen Negash, Kaitlin Rizarri, and Jo Billows. Thank you to Tiffany Hill for editing and mixing the recordings.

Our intro and outro song is brought to us by North Vancouver’s Tunuqsun. This song, Long Road Ahead, was produced, written, performed and brought to life within his personal studio alongside co-producer MideBeatz. Find Tunuqsun on all streaming and social media platforms.

In this episode, Kayla Webber and Paige Grant interview Denise Baldwin, from Ontario, to discuss her experiences of being a Black-Indigenous woman in Canada. The conversation considers the ways that Black-Indigenous and/or Afro-Indigenous identities have, and continue to be, invisbilized in Canada. Some members of these communities have been taught to dishonour their Indigenous and/or Black ancestors who have made it possible for them to be here. Denise draws attention to how she understands and expresses her Black-Indigenous identity. This episode was originally recorded in March 2019.

This episode was originally recorded in February 2019. However, it is especially relevant during the COVID-19 virus, given the increasing use of online platforms, and amidst conversations about life following the pandemic.

In this episode, Sefanit interviews Nasma Ahmed, the founder of Digital Justice Lab (DJL). Nasma is a Black woman whose work considers surveillance, digitization, and tech justice amidst an everchanging Toronto. She discusses her work with DJL and its necessarily broad scope, as well as the Sidewalk Project and critical questions important to future city building. Who do these proposed “smart cities” account for, and at whose expense?

To learn more about the Digital Justice Lab: http://digitaljusticelab.ca.

This episode was originally recorded in October 2018. It remains relevant today, amidst the COVID-19 virus, as we are imagining life following the pandemic.

In this episode, Jennifer Sylvester and Jade Nixon interview Alayna Eagle Shield, creator of the Mní Wičhóni Nakíčižiŋ Owáyawa (Defenders of the Water School), which began at the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ Camp at Standing Rock. Alayna generously shares her work at the school and speaks to the importance of Indigenous languages and traditions, particularly the Lakota language, for her children and future generations.  

In this episode, Chris Ramsaroop, Greer Babazon and Nisha Toomey discuss Toronto’s rapid gentrification. We visit the kitchen table to unpack what communities are most impacted by gentrification; explore how gentrification has been, and continues to be, justified by (settler colonial) logics of progress and inevitability; and we speak with a resident of Toronto’s Junction area on the shifted/shifting community.

In this episode, Carey DeMichelis & Bea Jolley delve into the Canadian rhetoric of multiculturalism. The Kitchen Table discusses what multicultural discourses miss and mask. And we are joined by Tiffany King, Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Michael Dumas, Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the Graduate School of Education and the African American Studies Department.

Dr. King, Dr. Dumas, and the Kitchen Table draw our attention to the ways that performances of multiculturalism serve as a distraction from the changes needed and desired for and by Black and Indigenous peoples.

In this episode, Sefanit Habtom and Sigrid Roman interview Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński and Naomi Rincón Gallardo, creators of the Formaldehyde Trip and Unearthing. In Conversation, respectively. Naomi and Belinda generously share their artistic decision-making processes, how they see art as resistance, and speak to future generations of Black and Indigenous peoples.

Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński is a writer and artist living in Vienna/Austria. Grounded in Black feminist theory, she is interested in memory and Black radical imagination. Her artistic work combines photography, collage, video, and performance. Since October 2015 she is a candidate in the PhD-in-Practice Program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna working on the project The Non-Human. The Believer. The Alien –  Unsettling Innocence. In the frame of this project she engages artistically and theoretically with the performativity of Blackness in relation to Austrian coloniality. Here she confronts three historic scenes that involve Blackness in Austria with new approaches from the field of Black studies.

Naomi Rincón Gallardo. (1979) Based in Mexico City, currently living in Vienna. Understanding research as a trans-disciplinary crafty fabrication, her work addresses initiatives concerning the creation of counter-worlds within neocolonial settings. Through masquerade lenses she creates a place between radical alternatives, fantasy and crises of beliefs. Rincón Gallardo integrates her interest in music, D.I.Y aesthetics, speculative fiction, theater games, humor, decolonial and anti-racist feminisms, queer theory and critical pedagogy into her work. She is a current candidate for the PhD in Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.      

This episode explores the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program in Canada by considering the modes of surveillance, exploitation, denial and violence embedded in the program. Nisha Toomey and Chris Ramsaroop demystify false histories of Canadian innocence and the white settler anxieties entrenched in the state.

In a deliberate attempt to un-forget erased histories, this snack episode considers a housing co-op in Toronto’s downtown core. The name of the street, the co-op, and the land where it’s situated, trace a relationship between settler colonialism, slavery, and antiblackness.

In this episode, various voices consider self-care in the work of the henceforward. There is a discussion of self-care collectively vs. individually, Elder Jacqui Lavalley generously explains smudging, and dark sousveillance* is offered as a form of self-care.

*Dark sousveillance counters and subverts surveillance mechanisms that target Black and Indigenous peoples. For more information about dark sousveillance and its intervention into surveillance studies, read Simone Browne’s book, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness.