Damon Williams: Welcome to One Million Experiments, a podcast showcasing and exploring how we define and create safety in a world without police and prisons. What's up? I am Damon.
Daniel Kisslinger (Kiss): I am Kiss.
Damon: We are back with another one. We are hopping in the lab. Of course, as always, we have our co-host and partner in anti-crime or-
Damon: -a partner in--
Kiss: A partner in decriminalization.
Damon: We have our partner in decriminalization from Interrupted Criminalization. We got Eva with us. What's up, Eva? How you feeling and who are we talking to today?
Eva Nagao: Damon, I'm feeling so energized by our conversation. Just really excited to have Signe Victoria Harriday come to represent an organization they founded in the Twin Cities, right around the uprisings in response to the lynching of George Floyd in 2020.
This organization, relationships evolving possibilities or REP that is a true experiment to see where when we use relationships as the building block of organizing together where that can go. Signe says that REP acts as a conduit for people in crisis. It answers the question, how do we have somebody else to call, somebody other than 911? REP is one of those somebodies. "It's giving people a place to pause," Signe says, and think consciously about what they need, it gives people a place to call.
Right now, you can do that on Friday and Saturday nights in the Twin Cities. You can pick up the phone and somebody will answer and say, "What do you need? How can we help you? How can we get you where you need to go?" It's a place for people in crisis to have a thought partner and to start building relationships that evolve into something else.
Damon: This is super exciting to share with everyone listening because for so many folks interested and invested in abolitionists' work, being able to offer new response systems is the dream, is the ideal. Starting to see that being tested in that capacity developed is such an exciting step for this movement and the society at large. Let's get to it.
Kiss: Let's head into the lab with Signe Victoria Harriday.
[music]
Kiss: All right friends, we are here with the already quite wonderful, Signe Victoria Harriday.
Damon: [onomatopoeia].
Kiss: [onomatopoeia].
Signe Victoria Harriday: Oh, that's good vibes already, hey.
Damon: Yes. We're getting to it. If we had more time, we would play a game with you but we don't. We're going to get right to this. This is-- Oh, now, you're excited.
Signe: Wait, what?
Damon: Okay.
Kiss: All right. All right.
Signe: Oh, my gosh. I love games.
Kiss: This is a game you cannot win and it seems like a game that's good for you, but--
Damon: Or lose.
Kiss: Or lose.
[laughter]
Signe: I like playing. That's the whole point.
Kiss: Based off the little bit that we've gotten to know already this morning, this seems like an apropos game. If you could have any animal noise, be your walk-up music or your intro music, what animal would you choose?
Signe: What came to mind is actually coyotes because where I am, I hear coyotes. They sound like cackling laughter. It's just like, in the middle of the night, somebody is having the time of their life and they just sound like they're having so much fun, I think.
Damon: It feels like a good Friday.
Signe: Yes. It's like everyone's just laughing, laughing, and rolling. It just makes you want to laugh too. I'm going to go with coyote cackles.
Damon: It's like what your neighbors are having a little backyard shindig that you weren't invited to but you're like hear them really getting it in.
Kiss: I feel like coyotes have...to Hootenannies. They're like doing a thing. They're gathering in the woods, the trucks pull up, they're having a moment.
Damon: [laughs].
Signe: That's real.
Damon: I feel like we have entered, you have succeeded at the game. Now, we have a more grounded tradition with which we like to start our conversations. It's a two-part question centered around time. In this time, how was the world treating you and how are you treating the world?
Signe: Wow, I like these questions. Thank you for giving me this moment of pause, which is actually really connected to the work that we're going to be talking about today. I'm going to take this pause moment to respond to your question about time and say, a beloved of mine, Sharon Bridgforth, an incredible artist and really a healer with the work that she does. She said to me once that time is an Orisha. It speaks volumes about the spectrums and the power play maybe of time.
I'm in that place and feel that time is relational. The world is treating me very well. I feel moved and energized and grounded and deeply affirmed by both the work of my comrades, my ancestors, and I feel a connection to future generations in this way that I think time actually is elastic and stretches and reaches us backwards and forwards simultaneously. I feel helped. How am I treating the world? I think that's a tougher question to answer because I feel like I am called to do better every day, and I fall short often.
Kiss: That's a real doozy right there. That's rings true.
Damon: For listeners who may not be in tune, Orishas are more or less to simplify deities of West African or more specifically, like Yoruban cultural traditions or spiritual avatar, spiritual guides, with complex dynamic components with which culture is shifted through. That's really powerful to hear time is an Orisha. I'm definitely going to reappropriate that for sure.
[laughter]
Damon: I was going to say steal, but borrow and share.
Signe: This is a great time to give a shout-out to Sharon Bridgforth and lookup Sharon and her work. That's a part of all of this work is connecting ourselves to the legacies. Ain't none of us got here by ourselves, ain't none of us going to get nowhere else by ourselves. Part of the ways that we do our best work is being in deep relationship and connection and honoring the legacies of those who taught us and brought us up. I know your listeners are really clear about that, but this is legacy work. [chuckles].
Damon: You're right in our bag. This feels like a home team conversation. I want to follow up on what you just said because that felt like a very accurate microcosm or personalization of the abolitionist project at large. The world is calling for more. The world needs more. There is change upon us and we have a grand responsibility and it is so large, and it certainly outweighs us all singularly. Even the sum of our parts, it is a great task that we have, but we got to do it. I'm curious, how do you navigate, ground yourself? How do you design the work to account for that ever-existing turmoil of the world is always calling for more than what I can do but I have to do the thing?
Signe: I really do think I ground myself with the thought and the notion of my ancestors. Even as you introduced me on today's podcast, I said, "Yes, my name is Signe Victoria, and that's because I have the name of both of my grandparents. My mother's mother's name was Signe. My father's mother's middle name was Victoria and so I have their names. I think that that pitched my orientation to the world in a certain way that made me be cognizant that I was connected to something before this moment, which also speaks to the power of naming both the beautiful things and the horrible things.
I think when we name it, sometimes, we have the better ability to also deal with it. I think because that was my orientation to the world, I think what grounds me is that they worked so hard to create a world that was better for me. I have grandkids and I think about them a lot. I think about, "What am I doing to make the world better for them?" It's that, what is that one, two, three, four, five generations of consciousness for me, that really grounds me and drives me.
It's all of the things that you've heard everybody say before, "You can't pour from a cup that don't have nothing in it. You can't care for someone if you're not caring for yourself." It's coupled with that. Personally, I try to find the strategies that do help to also bring physical and spiritual care to my own self, so that I have something to pour out for others.
Kiss: I love talking about the kinetic and potential energy of that lineage work on a personal level because I think it ties so much, and like Damon said, to the way that functions for movement space. I'm excited to talk about that a little bit. Before we do, we need to let you in on a tenuous metaphor that is the underpinnings of this show. Are you ready?
Signe: Oh, I like me some metaphors come through.
Kiss: We're a big fan as well. This is not our best-
Damon: This is...
Kiss: -but we're working with it.
Damon: ...metaphor. [laughs].
Kiss: The premise of this show is One Million Experiments. What that means is that we have haphazardly committed to a science experiment, science lab metaphor throughout this project which is challenging for us as two people who didn't do very well in science, but that's neither here nor there. I want to start where an experiment starts. What was the hypothesis stepping into the work? What did you imagine? What were you expecting? What did you hope to see?
Signe: I tell you my hypothesis. I am so picking up what you're putting down. I'm jiggy with the hypothesis.
[laughter]
Signe: I'm going to step out before I even answer your question and I'm going to actually say why I think hypothesis is important. To me, hypothesis is the notion that you have an idea. The culmination of ideas gives us opportunities for new possibilities or returning to old possibilities, even confirming, denying what's working. It's a strategic way of thinking about the world as well as an imaginative process, so I really, really love this idea of hypothesis specifically for REP: Relationships Evolving Possibilities. Our hypothesis was we could do it better, AKA when shit is going down and people are calling for help, so many people in our network were responding to crisis, whether it was because of a family member, a community member, we were getting calls.
Those calls were often an opportunity to more deeply engage and strategize with the person on the other line to help render some support. It felt pretty frenetic at a particular moment in history, as we were responding as a community to the collective trauma after the public lynching of George Floyd, and our community unity was experiencing waves and waves of trauma and assault and violence from so many different places.
In that moment, I called one of my brothers in comrades and beloveds and I said, "We can do this better. We are hustling and we are running, but I know we can do it better." He said, "Hold on, hold on. I got you." It was out of that, that we began this particular iteration of our abolitionist work that was about creating a better communication system and a way of connecting so that we could render support and care for those who need it in moments of crisis. The hypothesis is simple. We can do it better and we know that the state's been doing it horribly.
Kiss: What I love in what you just said is not only is it, can we do it better than the state has been doing it, but we can also do it better than how we've been doing it. [chuckles] There's this self-reflective aspect of it that, I think, what it gets to is this premise that we're not trying to replace the function of the state, we're trying to build on the networks and the pathways that already exist. The ways that people have already been taken care of each other, unfunded, unrecognized, unsupported in doing that anyway. I love that internal call of that too.
Signe: You're speaking a little bit to the values that ground our work. We have three values that ground our work: black love and liberation, radical consent, and ancestral knowledge.
Damon: Some fire values...those values real quick. [laughs].
Kiss: [chuckles].
Signe: We'll talk about them more. They come up, they really do guide everything we do, but you're really speaking into the ancestral knowledge piece, pulling from the beginnings of our conversation today, which is to say, we actually have been doing this and have been wildly successful at different times, but we have to continue to re-remember. I love the word remember because that word member in it. We want to be community members. We want to be put back together.
Damon: Put back together.
Signe: Exactly. The membrane, the ecosystem we're going to science it up in here.
Kiss: Damon's about to lose it.
Damon: We're doing it.
[laughter]
Signe: Are we? We're going there? That's what we are trying to do. There is a lot of this that is about recollection, but it is also about innovation.
Damon: Just a quick shout out before I follow up to that of that remember just hit me. I heard an interpretation of that notion in the Space of the Chicago Torture Justice Center, which is an organization birthed out of reparations of police torture that's deeply somatically informed. The collective body, but also the physical body in terms of an approach to politicized healing. There's this notion of those who are discarded, those who are locked away, those who are destroyed are forgotten, are erased, are disappeared, and often even return home-- there's this all this notion like returning citizen, return home and are still forgotten, are still disconnected. The notion of remembering, or psychological healing in a sense, but also bringing the body back into the fold, is so important.
That just resonated with me and I love-- just do that. If you got a word, break that shit down, we're down to play that game till the cows come home.
[laughter]
Kiss: Till the chicken come home to roost.
Damon: I want to get back to-- or the chickens come home.
Signe: I'm about to say the cows is home right now.
Damon: Which we also want to get to of like the land-centered notion of the work, but first, hearing those values and hearing that in a time of heightened activity, if not crisis meeting opportunity, this notion, this hypothesis that we can do better. I'm curious about the materials a little bit more, and the materials don't have to be like the literal physical tools. I think in hearing you say, "We're already responding to these things," we already have access to the crisis are because that even means that there's a certain type of work going on. What do you see as the equipment or the material? Whether that's physical or not, that allowed that hypothesis to flourish?
Signe: Well, first of all, we have multiple technologies. You were speaking to them in terms of the somatics work and the healing in the body. Actually, the folks who form our core group bring that, we have somatic healers, we have folks who are really deeply investigating the medical-industrial complex. We have a deep and expressed commitment to being in relationship with folks who are coming home as a part of our work. I think the technologies that we already have are the technologies of the body, the technology of the spirit, the technology of our ancestors, and there's this shared catalyst, it's like a spark, and I think all of us who do this work that actually just believe.
Damon: [laughs].
Signe: We just have like faith. We believe that we know how to love each other and that we can resist not just theoretically but in lived practice, the violence that the state and...systems have been wreaking terror on us and our communities. We believe that we can resist that and that we have the anecdote with our love and with our care to be the makers of better futures. I would say, some of the resource that we have is that these ancestral technologies, belief we chose to have time, and we have been also exploring other kinds of technologies.
What are the systems that we can build from a technology in the closed systems of like, "If I call this person, is this a secure line who has access to my information?" We're working on those things too. We're also building on the technologies that other people have shared that I know your listeners are well aware of like The Bay Area Transformative Justice Collectives Work and things that are happening in Eugene, Oregon, and things that are happening with Mental Health First Aid, Oakland, and Sacramento.
We have technologies and resources in lots of different places and spaces. What our work has been is to curate those resources to have them make sense for us in-- It goes back to your time question, in this time and in this moment. What are the ways that we can create solutions and opportunities to bring community together so that we are as ready as we can be to show up with the love and moments of crisis? because crisis is inevitable. I don't think it's that we see a world that is free from crisis, but we see a world where people are better equipped with the skills and the tools and the knowledge to navigate crisis with deeper love, with deeper respect, with the ability and the aim to get us all free, which is why we're grounded in black love and liberation.
Kiss: I want to get a little bit more specific about what those technologies have been creating.
Signe: Yes.
Kiss: From the outside, looking in and learning about your work. It seems like obviously, they're very interconnected, but they're kind of these two pathways off the center node, off the locus. Can you break down just real quick what those two pathways are?
Damon: I just want to say that node into locus, oh, no, that just tinkled my ear a little.
Kiss: I don't know if I did it right.
Damon: I'm telling you, it is--
Kiss: I don't know either, but--
Signe: You also made me hungry, because I was like, "Oh, isn't it Lotus root, a yummy thing to eat?"
Kiss: We're right next to noodles with Lotus is what happened.
[laughter]
Signe: Well, I'm happy to talk about this. The center, the core, are those values? That's where our name comes from, relationships evolving possibilities. That really speaks to the hypothesis which is to say that through relationships, we can create better outcomes for each other but we can't do it without each other, and we are about evolving and moving forward. That's the umbrella that holds these two paths ways. One, because we love our acronyms, is called REP, also known as Radical Ecosystem Pods. That is where we are really trying to facilitate and support the evolution of creation, the sustenance of pods. What that looks like for us, which I think is actually very much evolving, looks like resource sharing. How do we get grounded? How do we have a shared politic about how we want to support each other in moments of crisis?
How do we all know things about de-escalation? How do we think about Mental Health First Aid? How do we think about those things? How do we practice them? Who's in my pod? What are my boundaries? As somebody who does not believe in borders, I really, really get excited about boundaries because those are really healthy. How do you do that and excavate and build that into your pod work? That's one side. The notion being that if we had what we needed in our pods or our pods were connected to other pods, that ecosystem would be thriving.
Then the other side of our work, which was, in some ways, the spark for what we were doing, Revolutionary Emergency Partners. Again, the acronym REP. That for us is when you don't have someone to call and you are experiencing a moment of crisis, or you see someone else experiencing a moment of crisis. We have been conditioned in these capitalist, colonized, stolen land, stolen labor world to then ask the very people who did that theft to help us. It actually doesn't make sense. We've been conditioned to then call 911 and expect help and love and support.
What we know is that those are the moments when people interface with the state that can create outcomes and devastation and relationships with people who don't see you as people. The system does not see us as people. How do we stop that potential intervention? We don't call them. We call each other. Revolutionary Emergency Partners is about how do we have a somebody else to call? In that side of the work, we train up with each other, other fellow abolitionists. We take our time, we get a shared analysis, we develop our skills. We have, over the last year or so, had a hotline that people can call in our community. Right now, we're Fridays and Saturday nights. We're not open all of the time because capacity is real and we don't want to make commitments to community that we cannot keep.
Really tempering what it is we are able to take calls about, we're really specific about what we can and cannot do and all of that. That's what that side is, and it's a closed system. You call us and we talk to you, and ultimately, we try to connect you with the resources that you most might need in that moment. I like to think about it as the loving pause to go back to our earlier conversation about time because when you are feeling heightened, when your nervous system is not regulated, you can't make your best decisions. None of us can. It's like that pre-car accident moment. All those chemicals are flowing through your body, you just can't quite think clearly.
We create that pause that allows for space for the body to regulate itself so that you can imagine and co-create what is the next best step. We are trying to lovingly help people find their next best step. We're not the answer. We're clear about that. We're a conduit, but we can't be all of the social services because we know that those resources have been underinvested, have been divested, have been stolen, all of the things, co-opted. That's other abolitionist work. Thank you so much, community, for doing that work. We're really this in-between conduit.
Damon: Being very intentional about the capacity and focus I think is really valuable. One of the things that Mariame Kaba has popularized but is present in the work of...and Project Nia and obviously, spaces before that is, I think, there was this false notion or folks who were maybe just coming fresh into the space of this expectation of this one-to-one alternative. Not only does the norm or the system that we're used to not work and is underresourced, but even as being underresourced, it has existed for multiple iterations. [chuckles] It has existed, it has been practiced, even practiced in its failures or in its harm for decades, if not centuries.
The idea of within weeks or months or even five years to be pretending to feeling the whole of this mehemoth entity is a false promise, or is it behemoth?
Signe: I think it's all-hemoth.
Damon: The-hemoth. [chuckles].
Signe: You're right. They've been flooding it with capital. As these systems fail us, bail each other, we still fund it. We give it more money. "Oh, you didn't do it right? Here. Here's the more money." When in your life did somebody fund your failure? I want the same fucking grace. Fund my failure because you want to know what? We will innovate something better.
Damon: I love that. [laughs] I want to take the space to get into the meat a little bit because over the last 3 to 5 years, as there's been a growth in abolitionist consciousness, propaganda, education throughout our society, more people are taking the question seriously. Usually, the first couple ask of what do we do, pod mapping comes up. For folks who this may be their first time hearing it, it's basically a network of your folks.
Signe: Yes, who your people is.
Damon: Yes, who are your people? and making that explicit. Not just waiting until and then you're scrambling, but in a foregrounded way, who do you call when you need help or when you are being harmed, who do you call when you are potentially committing harm? Both of those things are in the realm of pod mapping. I'll speak a little personally, but it is only to open up what I've observed in community.
I found myself in formal and explicit pods and just trying to figure it out. I want to get into the mechanics of what would have been the new learnings because the thing that I wrestle with is the learnings or the experiences that I've had and some of these intimate, sometimes high stakes, sometimes more prolonged processes don't feel appropriate to share if that makes sense. There's almost an ethical question of who was involved? What was happening? feeling incomplete, that I know that I'm learning something, I know that I'm also struggling, I know that this is overwhelming. Bringing something out of this knowledge because the harm and the crises are so intense or so vulnerable or so sensitive, it's very difficult to discuss and talk about.
What that leaves is a lot of people saying, "Hey, we want to make pods or we want to do pod mapping." Then the people who've done it, how to be able to like, "Oh, okay."
[laughter]
Damon: That is the context. It existed before two years ago as an infrastructure, as a technology, but what I hear is the portal of rebellion and crisis made new possibilities. In the last nearly two years, what have you learned about the mechanics and tactics of pod work response? Because to close here, whenever you canvas or whenever you try to engage folks who this is new to and there's resistance, I think we simplify it. It's like, "Oh, folks need political education." I think what's your space is an example of is, no, people actually do have a consciousness of what they need and want. They want to call and response. Back to Black liberation African traditions. They want to be able to call out when in need and they want to know and be comfortable that where and who they call out to will respond and respond in a timely manner. With that, and that deep messy context, what are the mechanics that have been new or feel more grounded for you, even if it's still incomplete?
Signe: Wow. Thank you for sharing. I don't know that I have an answer for you, which I think is really unsatisfying, but is the answer, to be really honest with you. I think it is messy.
Damon: Oh, I've given that answer. [laughs].
Signe: It's really messy, I think. When you were talking, it reminded me about people who haven't had children and they talk to other people who have children, and they're like, "Oh, my gosh, I'm so excited. I want to have kids. I want to have kids." Then you talk to people who have children and they're like, "Are you sure?-
[laughter]
Signe: -Is that really what you want?" On some level, I think that's the complexity of what we're dealing with. I don't have a strong learning except for to say that I think you have illuminated one of the greatest challenges that we need to figure out how to do better, which is how do we tell the stories of this work that feels like it honors the complexity, it respects the privacy, it informs the intimacy, but also gives us hope for how to continue to do the work.
I think Beyond Survival as a text is a good text to read as a place where you can hear and read about stories of how it works and how it doesn't work, so I would point listeners in that direction. In terms of our actual learning, is I think that we see it as really messy. It's really messy and I respect that this ain't for everybody. I'm sorry. I just looked out the window and I saw our guineas in the garden and it just reminded me how funny guineafowls are. [chuckles] I wish you all could see this. Anyway.
Damon: Let's put a pin in it. We're going to go to the land into the literal ecosystem.
Signe: Okay. I just wanted to do the Tubman thing because Harriet, she taught us so much and I think I'm going to butcher the quote, but, "I freed so many slaves but could have freed thousands more if I could have just convinced them they were slaves." I think that that conundrum of the freeing, the decolonizing of the mind, that's the work that I think on some level you're asking for more tools to unlock our minds. It's hard because it opens up points of trauma. There is so much safety in what you know, even if what you know is causing you harm, you know it and what we are inviting people into some things that are unknown, some things that are messy and not everybody is down and that's okay.
Damon: When I'm in those moments that feel very difficult and I feel like to your opening point the world is asking more of me and it's prompting me to give more, but it never quite feels enough. There's that dissatisfaction of that but then there's also the revelation or the learning of this is a new possibility. If everybody was doing this, this would make the world better. Basically, when you Google rough numbers, we're going to use the US as an example, there's approximately 350 million or so people in this colonized space, and there's about 800,000 to 1 million police personnel.
We're talking about 1 to 350 is basically what we're relying on to respond, keep order to everything, and they are not equipped or trained to do everything. My thinking is, "Wow, if the 300 million or the 350 were participating in this way, we would be better." That's big number example, but we can go to a neighborhood. How do I get to the...and our little space to the community when my answer feels similar to yours? My answer feels incomplete It feels like a dangerous welcoming of like, "Hey, come in and hold this trauma with us," but we all need to hold it. We need to redistribute that labor. That's just a thought or reflection I'm going to pass to you, Kiss.
Kiss: No, and to that point, I think part of the-- if not danger, at least risk or vulnerability is not just that invitation comes with the trauma that people bring, but also there's the responsibility of protection of them if you're going to invite them into that process. I think it goes to something you said before of being so clear about the limit of your capacity and ability and what you're prepared to do, which makes it all a worse selling point if you're trying to convince someone because one side is making a much better claim, which is, "We will keep you safe," and we can't say that because we know that's not true, that we can't guarantee safety to anyone, so it becomes a different ask. It's like, "Come experiment with us," which is much less compelling and much more work. [laughs].
Signe: With the slight caveat of if you help people to recognize the lie in the protect and serve.
Kiss: Yes. People know that in their lives too.
Signe: Yes, we do.
Kiss: Including people who benefit fit from those systems.
Signe: Of course, it is. Also, I think-- this is said with love and the complexities of language, but I don't need to sell anybody anything. I'm also anti-capitalist in this measure. It's an invitation is what it is. People want to be invited. People want to be in. As I assess some of the things that I see most problematic about the world right now are that people have given up their own personal agency because they want to feel like a part of a group.
That group-think is so powerful, pulling away from that means you are pulling away from a part of your identity. You are pulling off layers of your own skin. I would like for us to think about making the revolution irresistible as the kind of people you want to be in deep connection with. That, to me, is our work, is we have to make a compelling invitation and we have to make it irresistible for people, even when it is complex.
Kiss: Yes. Basically, we got to be cool to kick it with to some degree.
Damon: [laughs].
Signe: Yes, in...
Kiss: Ideologically and not just personally. There is this thing of like, "This is supposed to feed you. These spaces, this is supposed to make you feel more human too."
Signe: Yes. If it's always hard, nobody want that. I don't want that, but I tell you, I will say that I am totally excited by and invigorated actually by the relationships that I have in doing this work. It is self-serving. Yes, we are cool to kick it with, but if we don't make it beautiful and powerful, and alluring, then I'm not sure that's actually liberation. Nobody signs up to be like, "I want to be in the struggle because I want to feel downtrod in forever."
Damon: [laughs].
Signe: No, I want to feel free, man, and I do feel free, especially if I know there's a safety net to catch me, and that's my people.
Kiss: We talked a little bit about the particulars of the time in which this space evolved, but I also to talk about the particulars at place because you mentioned the ways that some of these strategies are learning off 'em and building off of work from the Bay or Sacramento or Eugene, but you're doing this work and you already named it in the time of processing the trauma of George Floyd's murder and everything that came in the days and months and weeks after that. You're also in that space as well.
I'm wondering if you can just talk a little bit about what did it mean and what does it mean to be doing this work in a place that one, had so many external eyeballs on it and this externalized pressure of, "Show us what we're supposed to do next," but also just people going through that time that, I think, we've been through some shit in Chicago in doing movement work, but I can't imagine what that felt like day-to-day. Basically, what do we need to know about the experience of being in that space that has built this work and continue to feed you as you figured out what to do next?
Signe: You know what I would say is actually that the Twin Cities is one of the places where I know for myself, I have been humbled, invited, taught, scolded, reprimanded by Indigenous siblings who have understood the perpetual violence of genocide. I actually think that it is the blood-soaked land here and maybe not fully understanding, but from a place of deep desire to better understand, we have the conditions that help us to understand our interconnectedness inside of liberation work because of the American-Indian movement, because of so many different freedom fighters in this place and space, that's a part of the story that I think is actually really important here.
I guess the all eyes on us piece, I don't know. I guess being here, it's a little bit hard to say what other people were seeing, but I think we have a legacy here that is long and strong in terms of abolition that has been grounded in political education for a long time, that has seen some of the highest gaps and disparities in education, incarceration, medical. We're a place where-- I'm going to get these statistics wrong. If you have those kinds of listeners who can send me the updated data, that would be dope, but we're in a place where infant mortality rates for women with PhDs who are Black look like white women who've dropped out of high school.
I think that the conditions of this place and space have taught us that we have to do something different, have put on our doorstep that abolition and decolonization have to be a part of our daily struggle in work in ways that I'm not sure other places have experienced the onslaught of the mounting traumas from all of the systems that compounded are delivering oppression down to drowning rates. Literally, there's hardly an index where you can't see how Black and brown people have been hurt.
Damon: One thing that-- it's been alluded to in conversation but was very clear as we were coming into recording is just the land-based nature of the work. A thing that I've been trying to say in spaces more but maybe we don't shout it because it's hard to name in an urban space. In a space like Chicago of naming abolition as a land struggle. The ability to name who governed, who responds, who has authority, who has power in a space, in a ward, in a district if you want to call it that. That is about land dominance and land control.
The undoing of that system and creation of new structures and new possibilities is not just like going to happen in Google Docs or going to happen in text or on podcasts. It has to be physically grounded in some way. We have to understand the condition of the land, the ownership of the land, the domination of the land all has to be in question. Not only as our response or as our protection but in creating the new things. I want to talk just a little bit more about the land of your space.
How land stewardship grounds, forms, and teaches about abolition, new modes of intervention, new models of wellness and protection that we can maybe start to learn from the seed of or see as something to mimic in other spaces.
Signe: That's real. I'm going to make a couple of parallel connections here. I think as Black people in these colonized states in these places, the land that was stolen, our labor that was stolen. Put those things together because we became a commodity in the same ways that we extracted the land to be the resource that was done of our labor. I think that as Black people, we actually have an interesting relationship around bodily autonomy and sovereignty that is also connected to land sovereignty and autonomy.
I think because of our exploited resource and this continue in every iteration of society. Whether it's our culture our music so much is extracted. That having autonomy and agency is central to the work. This notion that the land holds the space for abolition to be possible is connected in this way in my mind. We have to shift our thinking about the land being our tool to extract from. What that means in my mind is you ask what's my relationship to the world and how am I treating the world? I have to be a better steward of the resources that are the earth.
I have to be in writer relationship with the resources that are around us. That does have to do with climate justice as racial justice. That does have to do with the rights for women and differently bodied people to have agency over what and how their body moves through time and space. The land piece is how do we honor respect and learn from in a mutual relationship. That requires listening. That requires time. As abolitionists and activists, we don't often have a lot of time. We don't have a lot of time to listen.
We don't have a lot of time to rest. Connected to REP and to other projects that I'm a part of, we are trying to build in rest as a part of the expectation so that that listening and that transformation, if we want to listen to the ecosystem, can teach us. I'm also a part of a project called the Fields at Rootsprings which is a land-based project stewarded about an hour and a half outside of the Twin Cities where Black indigenous artists, activists, healers, and other folks of color can come and listen and learn.
In that space we often say let the land welcome you, let the land teach you, let the land hold you. You will find and get answers for things that you didn't know to ask. If we have space for that which does require stewarding of space and land and having some agency over that, that makes those learnings possible. Even outside of this retreat-like environment even in the bedrock of the city, we have to invite the possibility that we can have some sovereignty over our space. We need to think about our bodies as part of that sovereignty.
We need to think about our relationships as part of that as well. I think that that's one of the things we strive for at REP is that we don't hold the relationships. We help to facilitate them. They're not ours to own. They are collectively by the folks who are deeply engaged in that, they are the folks who move that.
Damon: Can you go deeper in that?
Signe: We're not gatekeepers. You don't need me to solve your problems. You don't need me to be the answer. My facilitation is in that moment of crisis or in that moment of developing connections. I am holding the space to invite you in to the decision-making process. I might invite and iterate with you an alternative idea. I think with the state when they intervene in moments of crisis they tell you what to do. We're saying let's figure out what to do.
Kiss: I want to get a little more tangible in those moments and in those conversations as much or as little as you can share respecting people's consent and privacy. What have been some of the standout moments when that phone rings on a Friday or Saturday night that have helped you understand what does it mean to provide that support and that like iterative companionship?
Signe: I'm going to give you two examples. One is a big and global and one is more specific. The specificity of that moment and that interaction is really about the hello. I'm not trying to make it too trite but like when you don't know who to call and someone actually answers the call, there's like already a sense of winning. There's already a sense of relief and release that happens. You can hear it in people's voices of like, "Hi, this is Signe. What'd you call about? How can we touch base?" Just making space for people to be heard, that's it.
That's the very tangible of people calling.
Damon: I feel so good. Politeness feels like a westernized word but just like being nice that's such an important-- Just like being loving and receptive. That is a basic practice. Not even on a hotline receiver.
Kiss: On a cold line, on a warm line whatever line you got.
Signe: All the line.
Damon: ...through the world just like hello. I receive that for sure.
Signe: I think the other it's equally tangible to me but maybe less tangible for listeners is actually that it's not the call. It's that the number exists in your consciousness in your imagination. Knowing that there's an alternative to call actually gives you space to think about doing something different than you might automatically do by dialing 911. You might not even call us but knowing that we exist creates the propensity or the likelihood for you to be thinking consciously about the choices you're making to render support, care, or assistance.
That I think is actually the greatest impact of our work.
Damon: I've some goosebumps feelings because the truth is most people don't use 911. You just get taught about it in kindergarten and maybe a time or two but most folks are not calling 911 but the imagination of it is really important. The notion of we're not trying to abolish emergency response. We're trying create new imaginations of what that looks like.
Signe: Giving you agency. Maybe the third value that I haven't touched on as much but I'd love to like ground it for us is this notion of radical consent. Do you want this? How do you want it to be, and participating together to create whatever the "it" is. It's that radical consent and practicing that I think develops and supports our agency which connects to the sovereignty and bodily autonomy part of this that we really have to do. It's complicated because we aren't fully free ourselves.
We are not standing here position as folks who have fully decolonized our minds erased all of the insidious white supremacists, all of it. We are actually breathing the same air and drinking the same tainted water and have to have a daily practice and commitment to continue to work in decolonized ways and an abolitionist strategies.
Kiss: Beautiful in consideration of your already stretched time, let's end there. There's so much more to talk about. I'm so glad to be connected with you. How can people find you and your work in the ways you want to be found?
Signe: We have a website. It's www.repformn.com. We have a newsletter that people can join and you can reach out through our website to be in touch with us. We're on some of the other social medias. Yes, it's good to be in community. This conversation really was beautiful. I appreciate y'all. Thank you so much.
Damon: Thank you so much.
Kiss: Thank you for your generosity, and excited to keep learning from you.
Signe: Each other. We'll talk.
Damon: Much love.
[music]
Kiss: Signe Victoria Harriday, folks.
Damon: I'm just feeling it, exhaling, breathing, processing the opening of new possibilities and new ways to think about this work. Especially rooted in Minneapolis that has been through so much over the last few years. Taking this new step from which we can all learn and start to build some of our own models around. Yes, I feel really fed. Eva, hop back in here with us. What's standing out? How are you feeling after hearing that conversation?
Kiss: Let's get into that peer review.
Damon: Yes, it's peer review time. Let's do it.
Speaker 4: [sings] Hoping I don't offend all my peers.
Eva: I think fed is a great word. I definitely felt fed. There is something that we've talked about a little bit before that we need to make revolution irresistible. I love this. She says we need to make it beautiful, powerful, alluring. Damon, I think you said we need to make it cool to kick it with. What I get from this conversation is that REP is beautiful, powerful, and alluring.
Damon: Oh, I think I got some wordplay pun.
Kiss: I know.
Damon: REP means AirGo Repair Go.
[laughter]
There it is.
Kiss: We have officially done our job that is irresistible. You couldn't resist.
Damon: Yes. Could you resist that? Repair Go, come on, that's fine.
Kiss: Muah. Chef's kiss. One of the things that stood out to me was this idea that the biggest impact of the hotline is less. When people call it's the fact that they know that there's someone to call that they might not even ever call. In the moment where they would otherwise default to the crisis response systems that we've been conditioned to calling 911, involving the state, there's this moment of pause to reflect and decide which direction they want to go. The creation of that pause happens even if they never make the phone call.
Even if they never talk to anyone that that shift in consciousness. Signe named it, it's like that's the biggest impact of this work much more so than what they actually say on the phone, what their response time is, or any of that. It's that transformation internally for people in their community that she was so excited to have helped create.
Damon: Wow, yes. Good catch, Kiss. That actually really impacted me because so often if you're trying to introduce or challenge someone or make the possibility of abolition legible to folks who maybe have not engaged it or feel resistant to it. What is clear that it's hard to speak through and hard to name to someone is that it's the relationship that the state and the carceral apparatus and police have on folks, is not always material. It's not always like, "Oh, I called the cop seven times last year, and I don't know what I would have done without that service."
It is that psychic psychological space of there's an adult in the room, there's somebody I can tell to, to tell on people. Or there's the fear reduction of the fact that there is the imagination that there's something out there. Even if it's really harmful and detrimental and counterproductive and causing so much of the crisis at a structural level that then they get prompted to respond to. Just that intervention of, "Oh, there is something else to imagine and it's not imaginary."
Equipping people to move through their day, move through their interactions, move through challenging times, with just that imagination of a real resource is such a great offering.
Eva: We see that thread through a lot of these programs that are coming up around the same time with this idea of sovereignty of autonomy. Of being able to make decisions about the care that we want and need in these situations. I love how you put that, Damon and Kiss when you bring up abolition, the first thing everyone wants to know is literally who you going to call. We're always fighting against this one to one but it really is a psychic revelation to me that there is now a number in this place in the United States that you can call that is de-escalating.
Versus a number that is by definition escalating. If it's just the pause, if it's just that somebody picks up the phone. If it's just a moment, if no real resources or actual connection is made, even if it's just that time that you're allowed, that's hugely impactful. That's so powerful.
Kiss: There's someone to call, who isn't going to lie to you about what they can give you and isn't going to enact violence on you intentionally. That in and of itself, with the knowledge of the limitations of capacity, is such a huge gift and such a huge takeaway from this experiment. I already feel like shifting how I think about my work, even though I don't work at hotline, or build pods, only podcasts. It had to be done. I think for--
Damon: Repair Go, baby.
Kiss: [laughs] Get prepared. I hope our listeners who are preparing also to take on their own experiments, that understanding of the moment of intervention that disrupts these patterns of thought process is what a beautiful goal to work toward in your own space.
Eva: You will say it in the interview, this idea that we can do it better. What we are saying right now is that literally taking a breath is better than any of the solutions that the state is offering us. Just taking a minute to reprogram and understand that we can do something that's not going to cause further harm and that might be literally just breathing.
Damon: Yes. Do we have a sound effect for this? There's a meta reflection that I have.
Kiss: We do have a meta zoom, obviously. Don't worry.
Damon: We have a meta zoom, okay. All right.
Kiss: Here it is.
[background noise]
Damon: Yes, let's get a little meta about it. Because I feel that the conversation itself and how it was going and also, you and I, the balance we were trying to hold is something that should be reflected upon or maybe in itself. Something that's clear to me on an internal level and it's step one of what abolition is, it's a philosophical practice and practices. It's about grounding and reframing how we question our understandings of life, the world existence, humanity, to create the foundation for processes of creative undoing. That's a lot.
That's a lot of big words and to really get into this, you have to have what could be called up-in-the-air conversations. That's actually my home space and where I feel most comfortable. Trying to be aware of audience or listeners or folks who are coming to it, maybe needing something more tangible or more grounded. The fact that we're playing with this science experiment, very hardcore rationalist metaphor. Going back and forth with actually wanting to get into the ideas and into the way in which Signe and the space is thinking about and rethinking about how to relate with human beings.
We were like, "Okay, what's the playbook?" Or are there more direct tactic base lessons or tenets that we can share that folks can start to hear or act upon? I think the reality that folks who take this seriously need to wrestle with and be patient and humble about is that it's going to take a lot of reflection, it's going to take some big conversations. We have to go through rethinking in order to show up. It's not going to be here's your packet for your nonprofit program and we're going to standardize and duplicate these things all over the world.
We want to be all over the world, we want to have local and global connections. We want all seven or so billion people on this earth to be liberated from these structures. That's going to be a long project that's going to start with relationships. Kiss, I wonder how you felt about that of how we were trying to do both end of making space for what was needed to actually say, and trying to wrestle it down to a digestibility. That might not even be the reality of where the work is because the experiences are still happening, that are needed to teach us those things we want to put in practice.
Kiss: I think my thinking in real-time went to a conversation with Tamara, a couple of episodes ago, who for her, there was this step of, you get some lawn chairs, you sit on the corner, that's it. Everyone is always trying to make them more complicated than that. Of course, there's other things that happen, it has to do with who's sitting on the corner. Not necessarily the quality of the lawn chairs, but who's doing that work. I think in some ways that are too similar here, the answer was we talk to people and we get to know people and we have relationships.
We have some structure to build strong relationships. At the end of the day, that's what we have, is we have these pods of people who have consented to take care of each other and look out for each other. We have this community of people who are doing transformative work who are consenting to have new people brought in, who need their help. The resistance as an interviewer and I think for sometimes people in encountering that, the resistance is not, "I don't understand that," but that sounds intimidating, or that sounds really hard to really consent to be there for people like that.
Damon: That's that level of commitment.
Kiss: That's very real. I don't think that should be overlooked. That's a hard thing to sign up for, especially when there are no incentives, like Mariame said in the first episode, to do that type of work. Our culture, our economic structure, is not set up to like commit to being deep relationship and community to people beyond your nuclear family or your coworkers who you make capital with. I don't begrudge people who feel intimidated by that. I feel intimidated by that, but I also think a good takeaway from this conversation is at the end of the day, right now, we don't have the political structure.
We don't have the economic capability, but what we have is the desire to create consenting, loving, transformative relationships.
Kiss: Big surprise here. I'm going to quote Mariame again. This is feeding right back to episode one, back to something that our friend has said, ad nauseam really is this is the 500-year project. Relationships evolving possibilities. This is a real mantra? A lot of these things may not exist in our lifetime. To be truly invested in the abolitionist vision, I think you have to really resign yourself or really let this resonate deeply that the work and community and things you're building are very small building blocks of the things that we're really trying to achieve.
The liberation that we're really trying to bring about. I always think of relationships as that carbon-building block.
Damon: Oh. You're cooking now. You're getting right to the sauce of what this is because the notion of time that you just brought up really speaks to the specific organization. The name is relationships evolving. If we're talking about evolution that requires multiple generations, evolution doesn't happen within a lifetime.
Eva: That's just science.
Damon: Here we go. Hey, you hear that, Mr. Qureshi? I'm that was my 10th-grade science teacher and that's something that Signe, from beginning to end was so grounded in terms of lineage and tradition. How steadfast she was in naming that this comes out of the lineage of Black liberation and indigenous sovereignty. That these technologies are built from honoring multi-generational multisensory legacies. Abolition, reparations, revolution at large have to be grounded in Black liberation in indigenous sovereignties specifically if you're in this place and in this land.
That is a complex temporal landscape? The time of what marronage and what rebellion or subversion or practicing out in the open, or Black reconstruction. What if you actually respect what that project is, this is not something that's like going to get done in a three to five-year RFP or with the mechanics of a business plan. It felt really good to one, just hear that, because I want to just be closer to Minneapolis to hear how intentional that space is informed by these legacies and traditions.
Also to your point of challenging us, if our timeline is 500 years, and we are just contributing 20 to 80 of those years. It can actually give you some respect to the patience and take it easy on yourself of like, "As much as I believe in this and as forefronted as this is in my life and sense of self, I don't expect if I'm being honest and truthful to see a day in my lifetime where prisons and police do not exist." Even though that is when you think of abolition, what this is all dedicated to. Chattel slavery lasted in this land for 246 to 250 years based off how you talk about it.
There were seven approximate generations that experienced that. What were those third and fourth generations doing? If we don't see how the survival tactics, the resistance tactics, the learnings, the developments, the nurturing, the maintenance of humanity that was happening when there was no civil war to celebrate. Or no overthrow or no history book, time marker. We can lose sight of what the technology is, and it's about gathering our people and building these relationships. Really appreciate one bringing in Mariame on that 500-year scale.
That just really makes me think about how intentional and devoted Signe was to honoring these liberator legacies that make these conversations possible.
Kiss: Absolutely. All right. Before we get out of here, any last takeaways, anything else you want us to review?
Damon: I always got some more. This is the opposite of my science work again. I'm making up for lost time. Again, just capacity and how that was named was really valuable to me. One, the intention of there are these set hours on Friday and Saturday, instead of saying, "Our ideal is to be 24/7 and ever-present. Let's perform that or falsely invest or artificially claim to be that," in the ways that a lot of traditional direct resource providers are dishonest about the quality of what they're able to provide in the scale, in the name of just having bigger budgets.
The fact that it's only on Friday and Saturday, and also it's not saying, "We're going to send these new like hippie anti-cop that are going to show up and pretend to be able to do everything." It is, "We are going to facilitate, one, what's going on in your space." Not only is it about taking a break or taking a breath or having this psychic imagination of support that's present to help move you through. It's also once we get an engagement, we're going to empower you and your community and your existing relationships to respond, to restore healthy balances, if and when possible.
That just feels much more doable. I think I've had imaginations of like, we got to have 90 to 200 people that are trained in childcare, martial arts and CPR, to be able to do everything that folks on 51st Street will need. That's actually not possible. Right now that's not within our capacity. One, doing what we can do healthily as we can do it, and understanding those balances as needed. Two, also being real about what we're creating, which again comes back to a Mariame reference of, we are not trying to build a one-to-one solution or replacement.
We need the creation and investment into social infrastructure. We need to create infrastructure where folks can be connected to each other. It is through those connections that then we can create the structures for a response. If you have a library, a food pantry if we want to call it that, a housing institution, and a cultural space that you were connected to. Then there are a network of people that are interacting, that could immunity is then connected and woven in a way where responses are more possible than let me call nicer strangers.
Let me call less violent people who are unaware of the specifics of what's needed in these local relationships. That felt like a confirmation of it's not actually go build your response hotline right now. This work that REP was able to do is because they had been doing work for a long time. They had a community of people that were connected and had a relationship. This is just developing further what the work has allowed. I really appreciate that. For folks listening, again is just like do your thing. You don't have to be a restorative justice expert.
You don't have to be the perfect accountability process facilitator. You just have to be committed to people and do the work that allows for those relationships to flourish. From that, we can then create new structure.
Kiss: I love that we don't need nicer strangers. We need community members.
Eva: That's good.
Kiss: All right. Community members out there, here's your opportunity to share your review as well. We'd love to hear what jumped out to you from this conversation. What are the gems that are sticking with you? A bingo game of how many times we mentioned Mariame Kaba every episode, whatever you got you can e-mail us at millionexperiments@gmail.com. You can, of course, tweet at us Instagram, all those devilish platforms to share your reflections. We'd love to hear...
Damon: We're begrudging there.
Kiss: I don't have a better way. We're not in community yet. We haven't set up the hotline. Maybe we should set up a hotline for people to submit their thoughts. We'll get to that next episode. In addition to sharing your thoughts on the episode, I think we have a little homework for you. What's the homework, Eva.
Eva: This month, I'm going to do it too. Find one person, one group, one way to have a conversation that feeds your soul, see where it takes you.
Damon: We will accept late homework. For those, don't worry. No points to be taken off for folks who have homework trauma.
Kiss: We're an easy A class. Don't worry about it. You got an A already. Just see what you want to bring to the show-up. Don't worry.
Damon: High participation course.
Kiss: Exactly. Eva, how should folks get in touch and where should they get in tune with the work of IC? I guess we should also mention, of course, Project NIA.
Eva: You can always find us at millionexperiments.com, Interrupting Criminalization at interruptingcriminalization.com, and @interruptcrim on social. Project Nia is over at project-nia.org and all over social too.
Kiss: Make sure to subscribe, comment, review rates, 1 Million Experiments on your podcast apps. You can of course find our other podcast AirGo by typing an Airgo on your podcast apps or @airgoradio everywhere. I think that's all we got. Share an episode, bring in some new community members to the show, and we look forward to hopping back in the lab with you next month.
Damon: Much love to the people.
Kiss: Peace.