Into the Record: Delivering Indigenous Resistance and Rematriation, Sikowis Nobiss Combines Compassion, Community and Culture
Podcast Episode 1 with guest, Sikowis Nobiss
Episode Description
Sikowis Nobiss, Plains Cree/Saulteaux First Nation writer and founder of Great Plains Action Society, shares her journey of self-discovery and her Indigenous roots growing up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, before relocating to Iowa, Big Ag’s Sacrifice Zone in the US. Sikowis shares her thoughts on building community, the rights of nature, the benefits of rematriation and truthtelling at Truthsgiving.
If you'd like to learn more about Sikowis and the work of the Great Plains Action Society, visit greatplainsaction.org. You can also donate on the site directly to support their efforts. And for more information on seeding sovereignty, visit seedingsovereignty.org.
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The main Into the Record RSS can be found here.
Explore More
Truthsgiving.org website
Sikowis’ Op-Ed on Reckon - “Saving ICWA was the bare minimum. This is what Native folks really need: The ongoing threat to ICWA is just one example of the colonial obsession with controlling Black and brown bodies and ways of life.”
Episode Transcript
SIKOWIS NOBISS, GUEST:
I got involved with the New Brunswick Aboriginal People's Council when I was 19 years old while I was living in Fredericton New Brunswick. That's where I feel like I really got activated and understood that there was actually an indigenous resistance out there to colonization and that I could be a part of it and that I could do things for my community that I didn't know I could do because I grew up with such a different understanding of what natives were, who they were, and even who I was.
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MONIQUE AIKEN, HOST:
What would the world be like if justice were normal? What if hierarchical leadership was not the presumptive way to lead every kind of project, initiative, organization or company? I'm Monique Aiken, your guide for Into the Record, a podcast from the co-founders of Make Justice Normal Collective on a mission to foster just relationships and collective action among people working to make justice normal. In this podcast, you'll hear from changemakers who are interrogating history and the status quo. These path making futurists are forging a new imagination of what's possible as we co-create new systems where justice is the default and injustice, the stuff of history. Our guest today is Sikowis Nobiss, founder and executive director of the Great Plains Action Society.
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SIKOWIS NOBISS:
I'm Sikowis. My name means fierce. I remember being really young, younger than five years old, and I had this really weird understanding of who natives were growing up in Winnipeg because it was such a racist place. I guess a defining moment for me in terms of just how I felt about the world was a science project I did. The first one I did, I think I was in grade three or four at the time, and I did it on acid rain. On my little board I had this little card that said, "This is also really bad for native communities." So I had this weird understanding back then that there was something called the front lines or there was places where things could be worse, where people didn't have the resources to deal with things. I didn't know how to articulate that of course, but I feel like that's just the path that I've been on.
I saw a lot of that racism inflicted upon my father, and yet he just held his head so high and never responded to any of it. I remember being a teenager and we were going into a store to buy some beer for an event, which is a normal thing that people do, but where I grew up, there's such a stigma on it that if you see any native person carrying around any alcohol, they're automatically called a dirty Indian or a rubby, and these white kids started yelling that at my dad and I flipped out. He said, "Stop doing that. You're just like your mom," who's Hungarian.
And my mom would do that all the time as well, for my dad. I don't know, he just has so much strength and honor and he had such a hard life, both him and my mom, as an immigrant and my dad as a native living in inner city Winnipeg, they grew up so poor, very poor, and yet they just both had dignity. And I think that my dad, even though he had his culture taken away from him because of the boarding schools or the residential schools, he still was able to pass down this indigenous way of being in the world that I'm so glad that I have. My people were plains people, so they traveled all over. We never give up. We're tenacious. If you provide indigenous people, particularly indigenous women, with the right resources, they will do a lot. They will go a long way with whatever you give them. I'm a great example right here.
I got involved with the New Brunswick Aboriginal Peoples Council when I was 19 years old while I was living in Fredericton New Brunswick. That's where I feel like I really got activated and understood that there was actually an indigenous resistance out there to colonization and that I could be a part of it and that I could do things for my community that I didn't know I could do because I grew up with such a different understanding of what natives were, who they were, and even who I was. I worked there for about a year and a half, I believe, that was during the Burnt Church Rebellion. It was Mi'kmaq-Maliseet First Nations folks in Canada that were fighting the fisheries industry in New Brunswick and in Nova Scotia. And that was approximately a three or four year period.
I just, basically, got hired on as a receptionist, but soon moved up to assistant fisheries person and helped out going around New Brunswick talking with different indigenous communities about the fisheries issue and attending meetings with government officials and commercial fisher people to talk and debate about the issue. I was getting my lesson not just in realizing how radical our natives are and can be, because in Canada natives, they don't mess around. They'll flip a car, a police car, and burn it up. And I just felt like I could never find that true passion. I've never been able to really settle down on something until I founded Great Plains Action Society.
I'm in Iowa City. We have our Land Defense Initiative and then we have our Protect the Sacred Initiative, which is our missing and murdered indigenous relatives work, which really gets at colonial violence in general. And then we have our representation work, which basically is trying to overcome whitewashing, stereotypes, tokenization, romanticization, and then erasure, meaning that we need to get people represented in places they're normally not represented. Those are the three initiatives that we work in.
Our Protect the Sacred Initiative has morphed a little bit into our Siouxland project because it's really focused on a particular region. It's really focused on the Sioux land tri-state area. Sioux City happens to be a very special place that the city itself is split into three parts and sitting in three different states. There's Sioux City, which is in Iowa, South Sioux City in Nebraska, North Sioux City, which is in South Dakota, and then it's really close to the Omaha and Winnebago nations, which are in Nebraska, and then even the Santee Nation, the Ihanktonwan Nation. And then I myself do a lot of writing, a lot of talking.
I've presented an intervention at the UN on Man Camps and sex trafficking and increased violence in our communities, with these large linear construction projects like pipelines that come through our areas. It even comes down to abortion access. It comes down to suicide. It's more than just colonizers inflicting violence on us, it's ourselves inflicting violence on each other and our communities, on ourselves, because we've just gone through an apocalypse. What happens to the land is also what happens to the people. I don't believe in this colonial ideology that humans are separate from nature. I don't believe that borders separate one issue from another. Social justice is climate justice and vice versa.
Some people talk about the upcoming apocalypse with the climate emergency. I've heard a few natives say, Shelley Buffalo being one of them, we've already gone through our apocalypse. Been there, done that. This is why we are the way we are, why we have so many issues in our communities because we're dealing with the aftermath of it. I also feel like my ancestors just give me what I need to do when I need to do it. I do feel like my ancestors have my back and I do speak with them in my dreams. I have very, very clear dreams that tell me what I need to do. I get emotional talking about it actually. I really trust them. I will wake up some days and just know what I have to do. Sometimes I have a whole speech written or an article or a blog entry just written in my head and I'll just get up and write it because actually writing is my passion.
I don't like the word activist. Organizer is okay, but it's really hard to define yourself with, I think, terms that are already conceptions of the colonizer themselves. I think that's one reason why I don't feel like I've ever really fit into any particular group or definition of who I should be or what I am. There are basic things I am. I'm a mom. I do consider myself a woman, and I think I'm sacred because of that. I'm a matriarch for sure. Those are things that I definitely define myself as. In terms of executive directors and colonizers and organizers and activists, I don't know. I don't know. I just am who I am.
MONIQUE AIKEN:
One of the ways forward is potentially some of the work that you've been doing around rematriation. Can you tell us a little bit about what that work entails for you and your collaborators and what kind of reception has that work received?
SIKOWIS NOBISS:
Matriation really falls into our land defense work, because we use it a lot in that realm of what we do. It also is in the same realm as the Land Back, the term Land Back and the Land Back Movement. Really it's about getting stewardship back into the hands of indigenous peoples, land stewardship back into the realm of the animals like the buffalo, because prairie and buffalo go together. They can't be separated. The prairie remain prairie because of the buffalo, actually. And then the buffalo relied on the prairie also for sustenance and to cycle where they work together, they go hand in hand. And so that's what that means really. Rematriation means to give the land back. It means to honor native land, it means decolonization, and I like to use the word rematriate because it's really about our mother earth and about giving women back the power that was taken from them during colonization as well.
MONIQUE AIKEN:
I've recently been following potentially related efforts related to establishing legal rights for these natural entities beyond maybe some of the more ad hoc ways that we are fighting back on some of these tendencies of extraction. The legal rights for natural entities like rivers, forests, why is that particular kind of work important and who does that benefit?
SIKOWIS NOBISS:
The rights of nature movement has been going on for quite a few years now. I should say, the term rights of nature has been popular for quite a few years, but it's not like it's anything new to indigenous people. Seeing entities as beings, understanding that they deserve the same rights that humans have is not something different or strange to indigenous people. In some of our cultures, we even give life to rocks. Rocks themselves have energy and have animistic properties. This term, rights of nature, I think is really, again, just going off of how indigenous people look at the earth and interact with the earth and everything around us. And giving rights of nature to something basically just means that it has the same rights like we do, to be healthy and to be heard.
Unfortunately, a river can't necessarily speak for it itself, but we can speak for the river because we do see if the river is not doing well and how do we know that? Because if the river's not doing well, then we're not doing well. There's very much a connection between it. I mean, look at Cancer Alley as an example, which is on the Mississippi River and how bad the Mississippi's doing down at that region and how badly the communities are doing. There's a huge connection to that. This term rights of nature really is just like looking at our fellow entities on this earth as relatives. Rivers can be a relative, salmon can be a relative, buffalo, prairie, all of it. It can be a relative to us.
The Great Plains Action Society, we just hosted a summit in the Quad Cities on the Mississippi River called the Mississippi River Summit where we brought 40 people from the headwaters down to the Gulf of Mexico to talk about issues that they're facing in their communities. These are all BIPOC folks, like indigenous folks, black folks, Latino, Latina folks to talk about the issues that they're facing and how they're dealing with it and what are the effects of the pollution and the degradation of the Mississippi River. What is it doing to them and what can we do to fix that? The goal is to create a coalition, so we've had a couple coalition meetings since then to work towards rights of nature for the Mississippi River.
MONIQUE AIKEN:
An extension of that coalition building is some of the democracy work that you all do with Youth Voter Initiative. Can you tell us a little bit about that program and potentially how it's related to the general commitment to solidarity?
SIKOWIS NOBISS:
Basically, a lot of people feel that there's no point in voting. There's very high rates of folks in Indian country that don't vote, and that has a lot to do with voter suppression and the way the polls are placed and where they're placed. We truly believe in getting out the vote, not because necessarily we feel like that's going to solve our problems completely, but that we just got to get better people in office. That's it. And it's such an easy thing to do.
I feel if we can put all this effort at the front lines, if we can fight a pipeline, if we can try to end the missing and murdered indigenous relatives crisis, if we can do all these... put so much energy into these types of things, I just wish that people could take those one to two or three hours to go and vote. Because there's a lot of places in this country where the native vote can make a big difference.
MONIQUE AIKEN:
I think this is partly the work that the Youth Voter Initiative sounds to me like they're telling the truth, just making the facts available to people. Information is so much power and information and who gets to wield it, who gets to say it, and some of that is potentially related to your work, the term that you coined, Truthgiving. Can you tell us a little bit how truth telling in general helps to shift narratives?
SIKOWIS NOBISS:
Truthgiving is something that I started in my home a long time ago. I don't even remember how long ago, probably when I moved here. Because I didn't really think about Thanksgiving in Canada for some reason. I guess it wasn't really something I was aware of as being an issue back in the day. We have a different day for Thanksgiving in Canada, and it's celebrated differently. I wanted to celebrate it because I'm really lonely here. My whole family lives in Winnipeg, pretty much. I really loved the idea of getting together with friends that I had down here and having a dinner, kind of a big deal to me. And family and community are the only things I ever want in the world. I believe that if you have an amazing family, an amazing community, you are the richest person in the world.
But I felt guilty because, why am I having this dinner on this day, which completely erases indigenous, true indigenous history. It whitewashes what happened. It's basically a mythology that is told about these puritans sitting down to dinner with natives. That didn't happen at all. I just said, we can celebrate the fact that family is together, getting together, eating together, enjoying the harvest, having a feast saying, thank you for the things in our life, but we need to put this mythology to rest. And so I said, "Why don't we just call it Truthgiving?" And that was always the joke at my place. I'd have people over and I would make an indigenous meal because it is an indigenous meal when you think about it. It's Turkey and squash and corn and things that are from these lands.
I think eight years ago, my friend Dave Whiting, who I went to Standing Rock and who is a water protector, always loved to help out with Great Plains Action Society, he said to me, "We should do a Thanksgiving protest and we could just have an anti Thanksgiving event with music at one of the local restaurants in Iowa City." And I was like, "Yeah, that's cool." And we're just talking about what to call it. And he's like, "Well, why don't you call it Truthgiving?" And I laughed. I'm like, "Nobody's going to like that. I mean, that's just my little joke." And he's like, "No, I think it would be great." And he made a poster and we had our first Truthgiving event at a local restaurant here. It really just took off from there. I mean, a lot of people are using the term now, a lot of people. And we have a website, truthgiving.org, where you can check out more about it.
MONIQUE AIKEN:
Did you find any backlash to your Truthgiving work, or backlash in general to really these various streams of work? And how did you deal with that?
SIKOWIS NOBISS:
No, not Truthgiving. In fact, a lot of people have really embraced it. They appreciate it. It makes them not feel so bad about wanting to be together with their family, and then it provides them an outlet to talk about real issues and to try to make a difference. Some of the biggest backlash we've ever received are for things I wouldn't expect.
For instance, we had some really big backlash to an UnBan CRT webinar that our youth put on and to talk about how that's going to affect indigenous folks. And we talked to different teachers across the state as well. The, what is it called? The Daily Mail. Yeah, I think that's the UK version of Fox. They picked it up and then Fox picked it up and they both wrote an article about this and basically attacked us and attacked one teacher in particular, and that person got doxxed.
There was thousands of comments on both of these articles, just saying the most horrific things like, I'm going to rape them, I'm going to kill them. They better watch their back. She better walk around with a bulletproof vest. Really disgusting things. This person had to, we have a mutual aid group in Des Moines that we work with, and that actually, one of our people heads up, Ronnie James, and they had to post up at her house for a couple nights. It was not a good thing. And that's just mind blowing because the day before, I had hosted a webinar on abortion and reproductive liberation and nobody said anything. But this webinar the next day got this much backlash, and I was really surprised.
The other time I was really surprised was, I guess it was because it was during 2020. In Des Moines, we were there because every year for a few years in a row, we had these events at the Capitol Building on July 4th, pushing back at monuments to white supremacy. There's a lot of really bad monuments at the state capitol building, like the two settlers and the friendly Indian, the dejected friendly Indians sitting at their feet pointing the way to find new land, looking west. There's that statue. Then there's the 40 foot mural depicting westward expansion. There's a Columbus bust at the Capitol. These are, in my opinion, depictions of white supremacy, and they fall into the realm of what I would call hate propaganda or hate speech. Because they don't make me feel welcome there. They don't make indigenous people feel welcome in this space, which is supposed to be a space for everybody.
2020, I guess because of the current climate with the BLM uprising, we had about 100 white supremacists show up and a lot of them with guns. They had warned us ahead of time not to bring our children because they were coming armed. Because I guess they thought we were there to pull down some monuments, but we're not violent and we don't do anything illegal. We're just there to talk and we have the right to free speech. In a weird way, the cops actually helped us out that day. They kept them away from us. Because I had a talk with the local sheriff and I said, "These people need to stay away from us, and I don't want them coming anywhere near where we are." Luckily enough I guess, they thought we were there to take down the Columbus bust, which was on the completely different area of the capitol. So we were at the statue, like I just talked about with the two dudes and the dejected Indian sitting at their feet. We got lucky in terms of where we were.
I'm so surprised, but I'm not. I mean, what I realized from that is what is white culture? And that is white culture. They feel threatened because they don't have anything to look to or to have as part of who they are and what they are.
MONIQUE AIKEN:
These are awful stories of backlash. Where do you find the energy to a source of pushing forward in spite of it?
SIKOWIS NOBISS:
It's more than a love for what I do, because I don't always love it. It's my path. It's the path the creator put me on. There are times when... I've been struggling lately from the constant trauma that I have to deal with because it's so hard to be writing about this stuff, talking about this stuff, in this stuff. To be worried about backlash, not just from these white supremacists, but from the government themselves, even though we're doing nothing illegal, and we're just an organization that is working towards bettering the lives of indigenous people and not just indigenous people, but for everybody and in a good way and provide health and healing for everybody. It just feels like people just don't want that.
There's a lot of stress that comes with it, but also what makes me happy is it connects me to my culture. I'm really happy that through this, I've become so much more connected to my people, and not just my people, but people everywhere, indigenous people everywhere, and indigenous people around the world. I mean, I'm going to Costa Rica next week to meet up with indigenous folks from South America, Central America and North America, who are all, I guess, advocates for Land Back and for folks that want to talk about what land ownership really means in this day and age. I'm really excited I get to be with these people and learn more.
MONIQUE AIKEN:
When we think about who needs to come alongside you in this fight for rematriation, for Land Back, for all of these causes that we've been talking about, and if I'm so bold as to include myself and the MJN team in this set of helping hands, what do you need from us? And who else?
SIKOWIS NOBISS:
Firstly, we need resources. The First Nations Development Institute did a study that found that between 2006 and 2014, indigenous led organizations only got 0.6% of the $60 billion in foundation funding that goes out every year. And yet we are protecting 80% of the world's biodiversity. Our work has basically reduced fossil fuel emissions, oh, geez now. It's on the IEN site, Indigenous Environmental Network. I think they did the study, and I think it was by 20% in the past 10 years? Or has stopped about 20% of emissions from coming out because of all the work we've done to resist fossil fuel extraction. So we do a lot, yet we get very little.
That has a lot to do with erasure, with stereotypes, with misunderstandings of what's going on on reservations, and then what's going on off of reservations. 70% of us don't live on a reservation anymore, and why should we have to? We don't have to be contained in what these were, what I would call internment camps originally. Now, there are thriving communities in some places and other places not. Still, I feel like this is all stolen land and we should be sovereign wherever we put our feet because we used to travel all over the place and we were not herded into this one area.
The other thing I say is people need to figure out what's going on in their own communities before they come running to us to try to defend us. They need to go on the offense, particularly white folks, and figure out how to stop the problem at its source. And that means literally being in your own home and trying to overcome that white supremacy, trying to overcome those biases. I do this work because I love my people. I wish white people would do this work because they love their people. But they don't. There's a huge divide in this country, and there's a lot of hate between two groups in particular as we know. We should look at these folks, these white supremacists and these folks that are really ignorant with pity and understand that they also have colonization sickness, because this is not a normal human reaction to living in the world. This is something abnormal. Just like we have abnormal reactions right now with all of our issues we're dealing with in our communities, they're having abnormal reactions. I don't think white people really get that.
MONIQUE AIKEN:
Woo, that was a whole word right there. I think this leads me to, what do we value when we have cultural norms that supports this or that sort of ways of being? I'd love to hear from you. What do you think is the most important value to center in this work as we go forward and we think about the fact that our decisions today affect the lives of those coming generations and seven generations from now?
SIKOWIS NOBISS:
I think we've really lost compassion. I often talk about economies built on compassion. I've talked about that at SOCAP, at Bioneers, different spaces when I'm talking about capitalism, colonial capitalism, and the effects that it's had. And honestly, the only way to counter that is to build economies built on compassion.
MONIQUE AIKEN:
We often talk about hopeful action in our team. What hopeful action would you offer all of us to focus on? And is there a source of joyfulness in this work as we still grapple with the seriousness of your undertakings, our undertakings of this collective undertaking?
SIKOWIS NOBISS:
Building community. Absolutely, the saddest thing out there that I see right now is individualism and this push to be an individual, to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, to have to deal with everything on your own. I have been dealing with that for years since I moved to the US, before that even, because I moved out when I was 18 years old. And I've been on my own ever since. I've experienced firsthand the sadness of being cut off from community, the isolation, the depression that it creates. And I don't think a lot of people realize that, but yet it's seen through all of our media, through our movies and our stories, just the loneliness of living in suburbia, the nuclear family. It's all bullshit. It's all an illusion. Like I told you earlier, the richest people in the world are the ones that live in a really well-functioning community, where your children are not just your children, where your children belong to the community.
MONIQUE AIKEN:
Community is the path to joyfulness.
SIKOWIS NOBISS:
And then you'll have your path to joyfulness. That's my lifelong work. I hope before I die that I have created a community here in Iowa and Nebraska, which we're well on our way in doing, for indigenous people to feel connected across the states. I like to quote an elder that, his name is Terrance Bettles, where I actually got this name through, and he often says, "We need to listen to the children and to the elders because everybody in between is just confused."
MONIQUE AIKEN:
I so very appreciate and admire you for all you do, Sikowis, and the thoughtfulness with what you do it. Thank you for sharing your brilliance with me and the world through this conversation today, and thank you so much for your time.
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And to our listeners, we're grateful for your time. If you'd like to learn more about Sikowis and the work of the Great Plains Action Society, visit greatplainsaction.org. You can also donate on the site directly to support their efforts. And for more information on seeding sovereignty, visit seedingsovereignty.org.
Into the Record is produced by Make Justice Normal in partnership with Pod People. We’d like to thank everyone in the MJN core team - Anjali Deshmukh, Cari Hanson, Erika Seth Davies, and Charney Robinson-Wiliams.
A special thanks to Kristen Engberg and the Racial Equity Asset Lab for their generous support.
And at Pod People Alex Vikmanis, Matt Sav, Aimee Machado, Ashton Carter, Shai Wottitz, Kinsey Clarke, and Morgane Fouse.
I’m Monique Aiken, cofounder of Make Justice Normal, cofounder of the ReStarter Fund, Contributing Editor at ImpactAlpha and Managing Director at TIIP, The Investment Integration Project.
To learn more about Make Justice Normal, visit us at makejusticenormal.org or subscribe to our substack at the same name. Follow us on LinkedIn or Instagram at @ MJNnow.
The MJN collective has additional programs and products that we are resourcing. We welcome ideas for aligned philanthropic donors and/or sponsors. Reach out to learn more about the research we’re leading, tools we’re testing and models we’re prototyping. Send ideas or feedback to me at monique@makejusticenormal.org
Thanks for listening and helping us write justice into the record.
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