Nick Estes: Expanding activism beyond electoral politics (Ep436)

Written By kamea chayne
“We need to reclaim our power and understand that these movements are cyclical and generational and that we have to build power over time.”
— Nick Estes

What does it mean to expand political action beyond the voting booth? What are some ways that colonialism and imperialism persist today? And what is the relationship between building community locally and confronting issues abroad that we may be entangled in?

In this honest, hard-hitting dialogue, second-time guest Nick Estes returns to invite us to think critically beyond the suffocating cycles of electoral politics.

Join us as we learn from having to sit with grim realities — and look to the peripheries for alternative sources of inspiration.

We invite you to…

 

About our guests:

Nick Estes is a member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is a historian, journalist, and author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019).

Artistic credits:

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episode transcript

Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Kamea Chayne: I would like to dive right into the hard hitting stuff. I think a lot of people have this presumption that colonialism and imperialism are things of the past and we're in this post-colonial era. But there are of course different forms and stages to these things.

So as you take a pulse on the plight of Native communities on Turtle Island today – not at all to flatten the diverse histories of all of the different nations –but broadly speaking, what are some of the key elements you'd like to point out (in terms of the forms of ongoing colonization that still persists today), even if they're maybe masked by identity politics, or more representation, more native voices in mainstream media, in Hollywood, in electoral politics and so forth?

Nick Estes: That's a really good question. And I think in light of the elections that are coming up, one of the things that an indicator of is quality of life and life expectancy. Recently there have been a number of demographic studies and epidemiological studies that have come out talking about the rapid and sharp decrease in life expectancy of American Indians in particular. And I use that phrase, “American Indians”, as a way to distinguish, but also to clarify, what I'm talking about in this context.

And that encompasses mostly the American Indian nations within the continental United States and those who have federal relations with the United States government, whether that's through treaty or trust responsibilities, et cetera. That's a particular category of people that often gets lumped in with the broader category of “Indigenous”, which I would like to trouble a little bit within the context of colonialism. There are Alaska native people, there are also indigenous people in the Pacific. There are also Indigenous people who come from the South, Indigenous Africans, et cetera. It's a broad encompassing category. 

For the sake of this answer, I want to be very specific about those with federal treaty relations or federal relations with the United States government as the ‘settler state’ right? Because those life expectancies of that demographic, which the United States is beholden by law to sort of caretake, through various sort of land sessions and treaty agreements that they made with these nations, their life expectancy has dropped precipitously. In some instances across the board, it's around a drop of 5 .9 years.

In the state of South Dakota where I was born and raised. The average median life expectancy for American Indians is between 57 and 59 years old which is far below the so-called “third world” or “global south”. Life expectancy has dropped within the last two decades. 

These studies that have come out have shown that initially epidemiologists thought it was COVID related, but now as the life expectancy continues to drop for American Indians in the United States, they're finding that this was a phenomenon that preceded the COVID-19 pandemic, and that continues. And they are a broad array, even that itself sort of obscures the reality on the ground or the socioeconomic and material factors that lead to early death of Native people.

Drastic decrease in life expectancy [of Native people] is one of the key indicators of what we can call colonialism. Not as an afterlife, not as a legacy, but an ongoing reality. 

And the reason why I'm using the framework of American Indian and Federal Trust relations is because the Department of the Interior is a cabinet level position within the executive. And then for the first time in our history, we've had a Native and Indigenous American woman, Deb Haaland, as the secretary of the Interior. Huge advancement in terms of representation. But, [the drastic decrease in life expectancy] is also not to lay at the feet of Deb Haaland's administration, but it's to show that….

Even with these superficial changes, these deep structural realities of colonialism still weigh heavy on the literal bodies and lands of American Indian people. 

And I would argue that you could actually trace the early deaths of native people back to federal Indian policy, the dispossession of lands, the legacies of boarding schools, the stealing away of Native children, the destruction of the American Indian family, the destruction of our culture, the destruction of our language, et cetera. 

So going into this electoral cycle, we saw at the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the platforming of American Indians reading a land acknowledgement - I think it was the Potawatomi Prairie Band of Indians that are based in Kansas. I believe they recently got land back in North of Chicago. And the DNC was held in Chicago. So it was kind of acknowledging that history.

And it's not to take away from the importance of relaying that sort of reality that this is stolen land and that these people are originally from here, but it's to show the sort of disconnect where they can acknowledge the sort of presence of native people in these spaces, but yet there's not even a national conversation around why the life expectancy of native people has dropped so much. We can't even lay blame at the feet of any sort of institution of power right now because we're dispossessed of these narratives and the structural analysis to understand colonialism as it exists presently within the United States. 

One last point I'll make is that the Department of the Interior selects the secretary who holds such arbitrary authority over the lives of Native people and our lands, our waters, and our resources. That section of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Indian Affairs, is also in the same department that manages wildlife and natural resources. We do not elect Deb Haaland. She is appointed by the president of the United States. The previous one was appointed by Trump.

So if you want to talk about colonialism, it’s about not even having direct participation within the election or the selection of the very person, office and bureaucrats that control so much of our livelihoods, our destiny, and our access to resources, but also our life chances. That sort of leadership is dictated by somebody who is relatively outside of the authority of our own tribal nations. 

We can go back into history, but I think it's important to start at the present moment versus just to look in the past to say, “settler colonialism happened” or “dispossession happened” or “genocide happened”. Imagine the life expectancy of a certain demographic minority within a nation that the United States is at war with, sees itself as a rivalry to, and imagine they had a sharp decrease in life expectancy.

The amount of propaganda we would see from the state department alleging genocide, alleging mistreatment, alleging discrimination, it would be on the news every single day. It would be in the news cycle. But yet we can't even talk about it, nor do we have the frame of reference to even address that issue within the context of the United States. 

Kamea Chayne: Hmm. There's a lot here. I think one of the key messages is to stay centered on the more direct gauges of what we're really trying to understand. How are people actually doing? How are communities actually doing? And what indicators are more reflective of people's health and well-being?

You started talking about symbolism. As we speak right now, in middle of September of 2024, we're coming on a full year of this current genocidal bombing campaign in Gaza, backed by the most powerful military in the world. School season is starting again, and I'm already seeing posts about how universities have prepared in advance to shut down on possible campus protests and encampments.

I think what I haven't really been able to wrap my mind around is, this system historically likes to co-opt social causes in order to dilute and subvert them. Like corporations jumping on board to share social media posts of black squares and politicians wearing Kente cloths during the Black Lives Matter uprisings as symbolic gestures of support. And like you mentioned, more and more big institutions are issuing these land acknowledgments as representational support.

Why do you think the Palestinian cause has felt different where these same capitalist forces are not jumping on board, at least with identity politics or even symbolic gestures of support, even if that isn't actually followed by more substance?

Nick Estes: I think your observations are very acute impressions. In the context of the, looking back at the last two presidential cycles, we had Barack Obama leaving office in 2016. And then we had the Standing Rock protests, which got melded into the so-called resistance against the Trump administration. At the tail end of the Trump administration in 2020, you had the George Floyd uprising that was co-opted and sort of pulled into, as you point out, this broader sort of democratic strategy to defeat Trump. 

Now we're entering into this moment in 2024 in the midst of uprisings on campuses and protests against the U.S. sponsored genocide in Palestine right now. And as you correctly point out, it hasn't been fully co-opted within the narrative. And I'd say yes and no, because Governor Walz, who's the Vice President pick for Kamala Harris, has said that the uncommitted movement, which is a group of DNC delegates who are trying to change the Democratic Party from within the inside by withholding (well, they never even withheld anything) but they were trying to protest against the genocide in Gaza right now, but he even said this is group of people are doing this for the right reasons.

And so there's an acknowledgement at the very least that this is wrong, but we're not going to do anything about it. There are similar responses in the sense that even at college campuses there's this acknowledgement that they are invested in the military industrial complex.

This is facilitating the genocide within places like Gaza and elsewhere as well. But even though we have the power to change it, we're not going to change it because they’re going to claim don't have the power to change it. I work at a college campus. I’m a professor and I'm not speaking on behalf of my university.

I'm not even speaking on behalf of myself as an employee there, but I will say that the last three meetings I've attended with faculty have been reminded by administration that there are protocols in place. Some of them are formalized and some of them were informalized that we are restricted in our ability to operate in certain public spaces on campus.

There was a policy that was created for the University of Minnesota back in the eighties, I believe, that restricted the number of people who were allowed to protest and what kind of signs they were supposed to carry and the size of those signs and the banners, et cetera, that they never really enforced, but they're now threatening to enforce it.

Now with the student occupations and the student encampments protesting the genocide in Gaza, we're also told that our classrooms and our office spaces will be under lock and key. And that we should expect a more formal policy to be put into place that will basically restrict public access to our office spaces on campus. 

From a personal perspective, there's a political element in the silencing and crushing and the chilling of free speech and academic freedom on campus. 

It’s a huge concern but it’s kind of abstract. There's also a material concern when students and people who have come out of the pandemic are, facing accessibility issues on campus where these campus spaces are now becoming increasingly more and more inaccessible. When are they gonna just tell us the best thing for us to do is to just stay home and teach online?

It's created this sort of chilling effect on all aspects of our public and daily lives to the point where it's like the the people who probably weren't or who may not have been taking a side on this particular issue are now thrown into it because they're affected by the ratcheting down of more rules, more regulations and the increasing authoritarian turn of the Democrats.

Let's be honest, liberalism doesn't have a base in the United States. It doesn't have an organic rallying cry. We're not getting the same kind of people taking to the streets as the right wing is for Trump. There's not this sort of organic sense of community. Sure, there's people going to the rallies and everything, the public infrastructure and the social welfare, whatever it has existed within the state structure itself has been gutted by both Democrats and Republicans to completely destroy any sense of community and collective sort of accountability amongst people. And the only chance that you get or that does exist is through protesting the policies of the state, whether it was Standing Rock, against the carbon infrastructure and the fossil fuel industry.

And now we see the alignment of Kamala Harris with the fossil fuel industry, a continuation of Biden era policies that saw an increase in the leasing federal land for oil and gas exploration, and fracking. Even though Deb Haaland is a native person who went to Standing Rock to protest that pipeline, we see more of an alignment. Now, the United States is the number one oil producer. Of course that's not Biden's fault or a result of Biden's policies. One could argue that was a result of Obama era policies and his domestic energy production plan. So we see this sort of promise on one hand, but then the sort of action on the other.

There are differences between Democrats and Republicans and the parties that they represent. But the actions taken [by both liberals and democrats] tend to be against the interests of everyday people who live in this country. 

The majority of people have poll after poll has shown that the that they don't believe that the United States should have a role in the genocide against Palestinians, but nonetheless, that's not represented on any national platform. So even the ruling parties themselves do not represent the will of voters or the will of the people. So it's like, they don't need to co-opt Palestine in this moment, because look how much they've gotten away with in front of our very eyes. 

It's not the worst genocide in the history of humanity, but it is the most observed and witnessed genocide in the history of humanity. I can pick up my phone and watch it unfold in real time, 24/7. It's one of the first genocides live streamed to the world, but it shows you the failure of the mechanisms of the United Nations, the failure of liberal institutions within the United States, and the capture of those institutions by authoritarian figures and authoritarian policies. And so that's a pretty bleak picture if you're an everyday sort of voter who wants change or a better future in this country.

Kamea Chayne: I think I just have to also say that especially having personally been through cycles of narcissistic abuse in a toxic relationship, a lot of things for me feel similar in terms of recognizing some toxic patterns in our relationship with the two-party system.

And it's tricky because no community is a monolith. So when we hear things like, “listen to the voices of marginalized peoples”, well, there are Native and Black community leaders calling for people to just choose the lesser of evils and play the game, even though they recognize that that is not great either. I also see some leaders calling for divesting from electoral politics to not even validate the system and to at least support any sort of change in tactic or deviation from status quo patterns, whether that's empowering a third party to support them to meet the five percent threshold for access to more funding down the road or opting out altogether and choosing to focus our efforts elsewhere instead. And I also know some radically minded people who believe in the acceleration theory of knowing that this system needs to collapse and be composted. And they think that voting for Trump can help to accelerate that collapse. And collapse and systemic change can never be glamorized. 

I think I'm just still trying to understand these different approaches and perspectives that are guided by shared values and maybe different understandings of the issues. And I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on what you think we should be wary and critical of during these times, given your lens of deeper history that isn't entirely fixated on just this immediate moment, but having a bigger picture understanding of where we've come from and materially where things have been headed, regardless of the rhetoric and the propaganda.

So how do we stay grounded and cut through all this noise?

Nick Estes: I thought I painted a really bleak picture, but those options you laid out are really also really bleak [laughs]. And I'll just say this…

I think in the scheme of things like organizing and creating alternatives, voting is the last step of anything. 

It's not the final step. But anywhere else you go in the world people are also captured by U.S. elections because the United States is an imperialist power. So who is in power here not only affects the lives of people in this country, but also the lives of billions of people on the planet. It is unfair and it takes the oxygen out of the room. I thought that maybe after [the elections] from 2016 to 2020 to 2024, there might be a little bit of a change or more of an alternative, a movement alternative.

And there really isn't for a variety of reasons. I don't want to say that the movements haven't been important, but I would say that the American exceptionalist experience is such that U.S. elections, especially presidential elections, literally steal all the oxygen in the room. So any issue that you want to cover, want to push forward, you want to build on, nobody's going to want to talk about it, even on the left. And I think we really need to break that cycle. 

First, let's stop gaslighting ourselves that these election cycles are really the end all be all. Because the last election, they said it was going to be the end all be all. People were like “we have to get Biden in”, and now it's like the same thing. And that’s not sustainable. Even on a mental health level, that's not sustainable, but it shows you the levels to which that the average voter in the United States is propagandized — to think that this is the only articulation of their kind of political power or even power in general is to vote for people you're not even really voting for. That's to say nothing of the electoral college.

I would say that one of the bigger disappointments, personally, that I experienced in 2016 after Standing Rock was I thought the water protector movement would formalize into kind of a broader platform or policy movement that we saw for the movement for Black Lives and we didn't necessarily see it at that level. It was kind of pushed into democratic electoral politics, which we're never going to win because they don't care about us.

They'll say, well, the vote matters in places like Arizona, which is true to some extent. It wins electoral votes here and there, but in places like where I'm from, we're completely surrounded by Trump supporters and people who are going to vote vociferously for Trump. So our votes don't really have the same kind of impact because we're minority of minorities and we're not in a metropolitan area. And the politics of the democratic party focus on urban voting demographics.

The reality of Native people doesn't even fit and map within the electoral strategies. We're just good props at the end of the day, to prop up their ‘multiracial coalitions.’

And so what I think is more powerful and more impactful is if we look at the material impact that Indigenous-led movements had on the carbon output or the carbon emissions of Canada and the United States. There was a study that came out in 2021 by our Oil Change International and the Indigenous Environmental Network that found that Indigenous-led movements are currently challenging a quarter of carbon emissions from both Canada and the United States. That's a pretty substantial impact. We haven't been able to successfully leverage that to get concessions from the state. In fact, I would say that in many ways, the state has become more recalcitrant against Indigenous led protests against fossil fuel infrastructure.

We see this in places like the state of Minnesota where under Governor Walz's watch you saw the creation of an escrow account, that the pipeline company and bridge paid into to pay the overtime for law enforcement, county law enforcement, to police the pipeline. It's basically hired police for the pipeline company that happened under governor Walsh's watch. This was a democratic controlled state. And they couldn't defeat this tar sands pipeline because of the strategic alignment between the fossil fuel industry and the Democrats.

To put that into perspective, going back to where our power actually lies, like in these red states, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, you had Native nations get together and defeat the Northern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline within states that are hostile and violent to our interests, like violant. And we could have more political maneuverability and success under these right wing states because we fought back than we did under a democratic led government in Minnesota, because it had aligned itself with and it promised these things of Native representation. 

I want to take a step back and say, hey, don't forget your power.

Don't forget your power and where it lies, even though you might think of yourself as a minority because you've been minoritized within the system.

Look at what we have won as minoritized people, the power and the movements that we created to affect change. We challenged a quarter of carbon emissions from two of the largest per capita emitters in the world. That is phenomenal. So how do we scale up that kind of power? Well, if there are any lessons, aligning oneself with the Democrats hasn’t really proved fruitful. And in fact, it's implicated us and made us culpable in many ways and their policy agenda.

As much as I would love third parties and all these other things to come out, I'm not going to weigh in on who people should vote for, but I would say that at the end of the day, it's like…

We need to reclaim our power and understand that these movements are cyclical and generational and that we have to build power over time. 

They created a long game. We have a long game too. We've survived these cycles, these really crazy cycles of 2016, 2020, and now 2024, but we have to build our own power and we have to maintain the integrity of our movements so that they don't get co-opted, they don't get watered down, but we also have to be strategic. I think a lot of the campus movements have kind of seen the limitations of doing student-led movements on campus or having them solely student focused.

But as far as how you translate that into actual political power, I think we're kind of having this come to God moment where it's like, we have been sold down the river so many times by these people. So what is that saying? Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, or something like that.

And I think we need to have that long term mentality, but also that critical approach to whatever alliances we're going to make with progressives and those who align themselves in their interest to the Democratic Party. Because in my opinion, that has not been an alliance that has borne fruit for stopping what should be and what ought to be the most recognizable form of oppression, which is genocide.

Kamea Chayne: I recognize that things can sound very bleak when we're critiquing what hasn't worked, as we've done for the last few questions, but I think of Bayo Akomolafe's quote that had to do with honoring the power of hopelessness to not just be led back onto the same highways over and over again. Because if we can come to terms with these difficult realities that what we've been told (that only way to enact change through the system), has been an illusion a lot of times, then becomes an invitation to look elsewhere for inspiration and also an invitation as you shared earlier to expand how we understand politics and political action beyond the voting booth.

And one of my dear Kānaka Maoli friends was asking me recently about Palestine updates because she just hasn't had the bandwidth to keep up. And she also mentioned that she understands the conditions are horrible for Palestinians, and also her own Native community has so many needs going unmet that she has to prioritize and tend to with her limited capacity outside of her work.

And I think my response was just that I see everything as being connected. So as she and her community work on food sovereignty and reclaiming power from centralized systems, that is a part of the work too. I started using this analogy of ‘the mushrooming of catastrophe’, which is that these genocides and climate catastrophes are like the mushrooms just fruiting from the underground, extensive mycelial network of empire and global capitalism.

And so even if one mushroom were to go away, the underlying conditions are still there and still ripe for another catastrophe to fruit and come about. Even if some efforts feel like they're not really targeting the specific and visible mushrooms that are popping up, but they are stripping away at the mycelium underground, that still makes a difference through the lens of power and the reclamation of power. 

A lot of these theories of change is what I've been sitting with, but I would love to hear your thoughts also on like, what is the relationship between people focusing on building community locally and also coming into solidarity for crises that are happening across the globe that we are also entangled and complicit in?

Nick Estes: I think that's a really important question. I think a lot of times people tend to pit these things against each other. There are some really beautiful movements within the global South, one would be the MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra), the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, which I had an honor to actually meet and talk with. They're very invested in the very same things that your friend and your collaborators invested in the creation of local food systems and decolonizing food and agricultural production, but also reclaiming of land and creating a new kind of communal culture.

But they're also very concerned about geopolitics. Because Brazil produces like 30% of the world's food, but yet there's people starving in Brazil and there's food scarcity.

What does it mean when the servers of the world's bread basket, the people who are making the food, don't even have access to it? You can't separate these geopolitical concerns about the sort of the value chain of empire from the movements themselves as they're trying to create and build the society that they want to live in.

And so I think that's a perfect example and I think the one that you gave is also important too.

The levelling up that we have to do in this country is to understand that the United States empire as it exists now is the biggest threat to freedom and alternatives in the world. They're responsible for sanctioning a quarter of the world's population.

They're responsible for arming this genocidal regime in Palestine. These are threats to peace. They're responsible for arming up NATO and preparing for this new Cold War against China. And these are things that I think a lot of people on the ground, they might encounter this in a cultural level of like, oh I don't like China because it's authoritarian or whatever, but I don't think that they necessarily have a vested interest in the ruling class interest of targeting these places or necessarily understand these sort of relations of power.

But I'm also somebody who doesn’t believe that the working people, the working poor, people in the United States are just some dupes of empire and that they're benefiting from the exploitation of others. To some degree that's true, but also there are people who are suffering and can be mobilized, and have been. And creating local community-based movements and campaigns is the best way to start. 

And I would say here in the city in Minneapolis, one of the campaigns that I’ve been impressed with was the roof depot campaign here, where it brought together trade unions, different neighborhood organizations, anti-war organizations, as well as the Native community that was impacted by this dump, this proposed demolition of this really toxic site in the city. And the land was eventually, or is in the process of getting reclaimed.

But it was an urban-centered movement that kind of talked about community safety and health within the context of how these struggles related to each other. And it forced people into community and to have conversations, where people were activated by that experience. Why is it that when the poorest part of the city has to fight so hard just to have clean air to breathe?

In the middle of a blizzard, they deployed Minneapolis police department, hundreds of them, to literally evict nine people in this encampment. That's what the state is willing to spend its resources on. That should be a moral indictment against any politician who sees that as a worthwhile expenditure of resources when all these people are asking for is governance over the air they breathe.

That should be a fundamental human right. It is a fundamental human right, but not in this country. I give that as a perfect example of how land defense operates within an urban setting, Indigenous led land defense.

Kamea Chayne: Well, I'm always interested in hearing what you have to say on so many different subject matters, because I really value and appreciate your very grounded and history informed lens. And not to have you speak to so many things at once, although in many ways it is important to draw all these connections. But right now there are simultaneous genocides in Palestine, in the Congo and Sudan, and activists are calling for different forms of boycott, BDS for certain targeted institutions, boycotting the UAE, boycotting new smartphones and new technologies.

And I also feel that if we were to really go down this rabbit hole, we're pretty much talking about a total boycott and divestment from mainstream systems and really needing to rely on the arteries of empire to live because boycotting is essentially about saying no. And I think also in conjunction with saying no to something, we also have to be saying yes to something. And ideally we want that yes to not just be something that is a little less horrible, but actually something we want to build. 

So to wrap up our discussion, this leads us towards a question of what do we want to build and how do we continue to water the seeds and seedlings of these alternative possibilities that already exist in each of our unique contexts? With that, I would be curious to hear where you look to for inspiration and any other words of guidance you have for us during these troubled times.

Nick Estes: When I write, I try to find inspiration in the sort of poetry of resistance. And I wrote this new afterword to the paperback version of my book, Our History is the Future, which is now out as a way to address the issues that you're talking about.

Madonna Thunder Hawk, a Red Power activist elder, was once asked, why did you give your entire life over to the movement? And without hesitation, she just said, ‘I did it because I want to be a good ancestor to the future. I want to be remembered as somebody who did something.’ And then there's this other interview that I did with the late Dakota scholar, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, who also had a profound influence on my life. I asked her questions, similar to your questions, about where do you get inspiration? She said, you know, you don't even own your own life. You're only here to ensure the coming of the next generation.

And those are the ways that our people, the Oceti Sakowin have thought. We typically think about this idea of wellness and mindfulness, PTSD and trauma as these individualized sort of missions that we're on or like they're medicalized in many ways. That it's our bodies that kind of carry these traumas. And that’s true, but it’s also a Western framing. We collectively, the body politic, our body politic of Indigenous people, people of color, people in struggle are harmed and traumatized by these things.

Our response and healing actually has to be collective.

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and Madonna Thunder Hawk, not only are they in communion with their ancestors, they are also in communion with the descendants or the ancestors of the future. And that is a temporal kind of framing or solution to the problem that we're facing now that I just don't think is readily on offer. But I find inspiration in their words to be reminded that in the darkest moments, we have to act and have to search out those forms of relationality, whether they be in community in the present or those communions of the past or the future.

Kamea Chayne: Well, we are coming to a close here. You can find Nick's work with The Red Nation at therednation.org and Indigenous for Palestine.org. We'll have more links and resources from this episode in our show notes at greendreamer.com, and to listen to the full and extended version of this conversation and to support our community-powered show, join us on Patreon today at Patreon.com/greendreamer.

For now, here are some of Nick's closing words of wisdom for us.

Nick Estes: Don't self alienate. Be in community, especially in these moments of really terrible danger. We have our collective power to hold onto. Palestine is a small country on the map, but its heart is so big. And instead of turning inward in this time of genocide, they've turned outward. And I think that's a lesson to all of us in this moment.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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