Damon Williams: Welcome to One Million Experiments.
Daniel Kisslinger (Kiss): A podcast showcasing and exploring how we define and create safety in a world without policing and prisons.
Damon: I'm Damon.
Kiss: I am Kiss and we are in the flow in our second season of 1ME. As always, we have our wonderful, brilliant trustee partner in decriminalization here with us, Eva Nagao from Interrupting Criminalization. Welcome back to the show.
Eva Nagao: Hey, guys, it's good to see you.
Kiss: I feel like, after 15 or so episodes, you don't get the full bird of prey sound effect. You get maybe a morning dove warbler-type situation. Are you okay with that?
Eva: No, familiarity breeds -
Kiss: Pigeons, I guess.
Eva: Pigeons, I guess.
Kiss: Eva, who are we talking to today?
Eva: Today we have the great pleasure to invite Kalayo Pestaño the co-executive director and Derek Dizon, the community organizer from API Chaya in Seattle. API Chaya is a survivor-led organization that focuses on serving survivors of sexual violence, human trafficking, and domestic violence from Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian, Asian, and South Asian communities. API Chaya believes in centering those at the margins that keep young people, faith-based communities, queer and trans-Black indigenous and people of color, people with disabilities, and immigrants at their core.
They recognize that our communities have the resources, traditions, and legacies that we need to build the relationships and families we want for generations to come. We're going to go into a little bit about what API Chaya does in terms of services, but in general, they help survivors move from crisis to healing and thriving. They have free confidential wraparound services that include intensive case management, safety planning, emotional support, legal services, and therapy. Their advocates work closely with survivors to reach safety and independence.
Kiss: One of those programs, and really what we focus on in this conversation is their Natural Helpers program. Can you tell us a little bit about what that is?
Eva: The Natural Helpers program supports community members in learning about human trafficking, domestic and sexual violence, and the societal forces that create conditions for violence. They help community members skill build around how to respond to harm and justice and support survivors. API Chaya Natural Helpers receive training to support loved ones and community members dealing with violence in their lives. They learn from experienced staff members and community leaders engage in informative and exciting events and are welcomed into a community of collective action towards ending violence.
Damon: Just a heads up, we spend a lot of the conversation talking about and uncovering the origin story of API Chaya and the Natural Helpers program and this is one of the most beautiful moving, and honestly heavy origin stories we've heard in the work that we've covered.
Kiss: It's heavy and beautiful and we're excited to get into it. Let's hop into the lab with Derek and Kalayo.
[music]
Damon: We are hopping into the lab with Natural Helpers Kalayo and Derek. Welcome, welcome, welcome.
Kiss: We got to give the sound effect to you.
Damon: Let's go back, let's do that again. That wasn't--
Kiss: Come on. As if we've never done this. We are a little rusty. It's been a minute.
Damon: I was waiting on you and I was going to accent.
Kiss: I was waiting on you. It's a whole thing.
Damon: No, we double Dutch that improperly. Let's do it again. We are here. We are in the lab with Natural Helpers Kalayo and Derek in the building.
[cheering]
Kiss: See why we went back for that?
Kalayo Pestaño: Yes.
Damon: That's what we're bringing in. That's how we do this.
Derek Dizon: That was definitely needed.
Damon: Welcome to the One Million Experiments Lab we like to start all of our conversations with a tradition and that is a two-part question. This question centers around time. In this time and define time however you will, this day, this hour, this season, this lifetime. In this time, how is the world treating you and how are you treating the world?
Kalayo: Ooh, that's like a whole podcast right there.
Damon: It could be, it could be.
Kalayo: I could get us started. In this time, the world is treating me with some grace and some fun retrograde energies around like scheduling and the way that we are aligning altogether really in terms of time. I actually have a baby who's almost two and that's like much of how I interact with the world is with and through my child.
That's very fun and feels new and exciting in so many ways, exploring and experiencing new things through their lens. I'm treating the world. I am really just trying to extend emotionally and spiritually somewhere in the Pacific Northwest because it's hard to let go, it's a glorious time here and it's been a really sweet summer. Then also just trying to make small changes in the realm of my own control and hopefully that ripples out to just more good things in the world.
Kiss: What about you, Derek? How's the world treating you and how are you treating the world?
Derek: I feel like the world is so fast right now. I think about where I am at in my life and the life that has been before me and thinking to myself, how did I get here? I guess the answer that comes to me right now is it's fast. It feels it's just going so fast, but also when I think about it, it's in slow motion.
It's almost when you feel one of those life-flashing-before-your-eyes type moments. I feel that way right now about the world. I feel like the world is throwing me for a little bit of a spin, and how am I giving back to it? I'm just letting it do its thing. [crosstalk] I'm spinning around in the world and just witnessing it, do whatever it needs to do to me, and seeing how I can be helpful in the whirlwind of it all.
Kiss: Trying not to get too dizzy, I imagine.
Kalayo: Doing a little twirl.
Derek: Yes. [laughs] Doing a little twirl.
Kiss: Derek, you mentioned this question of how did we get here? How did I get in this life that I'm building? I think we want to start on the organizational end with a similar question, which is we have this very fraught, tenuous metaphor that we use because neither Damon or I were star science students, but we made a science metaphor podcast, but we do know an experiment starts with a hypothesis. When we talk about Natural Helpers, when it was starting in the days, months, weeks before it existed in any form, what was the hypothesis behind it, and what it could make possible in this world?
Derek: I'm not sure if there was necessarily a hypothesis. It came out as an organic action. It didn't necessarily come out of, if we do this, then we will expect this to happen. I feel the Natural Helpers program grew out of this is happening now, so let's just do it now, if that makes sense. Am I understanding hypothesis right? I'm also not a science person, but that's my understanding of hypotheses, but the Natural Helpers history is grounded in action in the now.
Kiss: Can we talk a little bit about that history that it grew out of? I know it's a long history of the organization and of course, this work goes beyond that, but just give a little bit about the history that this work emerged from.
Derek: Sure. Is it okay if I jump in, Kalayo?
Kalayo: Yes.
Derek: The Natural Helpers model is really reflective of our organizational roots. These roots are now almost three decades old, but our organizational history is really deep rooted in how communities look out for another through a sense of our culture through our ancestry.
One of the origin stories of our organization is that of Susana Remerata Blackwell and she was a young Filipina navigating a violent relationship. She's from the Philippines. She met this man named Timothy Blackwell. They had corresponded through letters like pen paling type of a thing, I guess you could call it, but really it was through this catalog where women from foreign countries were advertised for foreign men to make these relationships and have these connections, but for women in the Philippines, it was advertised as let's have a pen pal. Let's practice your English.
Susana met this man named Timothy in the early 1990s, do this cataloging business and it soon grew into an actual relationship. Shortly after Timothy went to the Philippines, married Susana, and brought her back to Washington State. I don't know if you all have been to Washington State before, especially during the winter, and that is when Susana came here, but it's very different than the Philippines. It's super cold. There's no sun. Obviously, it's a different culture, a different language.
She was really brought here out of her ecosystem. Out of her family support. Out of her land, her people, her language. Unfortunately, soon after she was brought over here, Timothy began being violent towards her, making threats, being physically and sexually abusive. She didn't know many people at the time. In fact, I don't think she knew any people at the time. She was really isolated. Not only was she socially isolated, I think spiritually and culturally, she was also without that connection.
At that time when she was surviving this violent relationship, she called home to one of her friends and let her know, "Hey, this is my situation. This is what's happened to me." That friend in the Philippines said, "Hey, I actually have a friend that lives in Seattle. You should connect with her. Her name is Phoebe, and I think she might be able to help you out." Phoebe is my mom. This is where I enter the story.
Damon: Shout out to mom.
Derek: Shout out to mom. She actually came from the same island as Susana. It's an island called Masbate. The friend from Masbate connected my mom to Susana. My mother even though she wouldn't identify it, but she was definitely a community organizer. This is her holding up a brown and yellow cake. She's wearing kind of this.
Kiss: The cake is looking well done. That's a well-made cake.
Derek: It is. It's a well-made cake. She put a lot of intention in the things she she did for her community. Just like her cakes, just like the events she organized, she really cared for the people around her, and Susana was one of those people. She got connected to Susana, and really advocated for her safety, for her to not be in this relationship anymore. My mom also pulled in another friend, her name was Veronica Laureta Johnson.
These two Filipino women connected with Susana. They're here forming this relationship, this friendship, and it's through their culture, through their shared history of migration, through their similar language. That's I think a really integral piece here is that my mom spoke the same dialect as Susana did. She came from the same environments and ecosystems, same land, same people. They had that cultural connection there. It's really through their friendship that they were able to connect her to local resources. Getting a lawyer. Helping her get shelter.
I think at one point my family even housed Susana. I even remember as a child having Susana and Timothy over at my home and then having meetings in the living room that I wasn't allowed to be involved with. Already we see this community, grounded in culture, looking out for each other with the tools that they have, trying to provide resources and mitigation to this really awful relationship. They just started the divorce court procedures. I think that lasted several months, and in that time Susana was out here living her life.
Unfortunately, at the end of the divorce court hearing in the King County Courthouse in Seattle, Timothy was able to sneak in a gun into the courthouse. My mother was there as a witness, as an advocate, so was Veronica. At the last day of the proceedings, Timothy killed Susana who was at that time pregnant with her baby. He killed my mother. He also killed Veronica as well. When that happened a lot of folks in the community were like, "What is this? Why is this happening in our community?" Unfortunately, this wasn't the first of its kind in Seattle in the 1990s, and the Asian and Pacific Islander community.
What made this case really particular was that it was done in a federal office. It made both local, national, and global news at the time. Here locally, people were trying to wrap our heads around, "Why does gender-based violence occur in our communities? What are the pushes and pulls and contributions as to why this exists?" I think on a personal note, for me, I was just shy of five years old, and so I was really confused. I was trying to wrap my own head around, "What does that mean she died? What does it mean to not have your mom here?" I think I was trying to understand it as a child.
Aside from how it was impacting my family, and over the tremendous way, was also impacting our community. It really galvanized people in the Seattle area, Asian and Pacific Islander people, and South Asian folks to come together to really ask these questions. What we did know is that we needed more education around why gender-based violence exists. At that time, a lot of people, at least in the Filipino community, were doing a lot of anti-imperial organizing in the Philippines, and also in the US too.
People were drawing the lines of like, "What does it mean to come from a colonized country? What does it mean to come from a place where resources are being taken from our land which forces people to migrate out and be displaced in this land? What does it mean for those people to continue to survive here, especially as we come from a legacy of imperialism and colonialism, especially if you're a woman or femme?"
From these discussions and desire to learn more and to know more about prevention, about why this happens in our community, the Natural Helpers training was born, to really delve into understanding more why this happens, and also providing resources and how to support survivors and community just how Phoebe and Veronica did. They weren't lawyers. They weren't social workers. They didn't have master's degrees.
My mom went to the local community college to learn how to decorate cakes. I mean, she was a midwife, I will say, too, but these weren't people who were knowledgeable in systems of oppression. These were people who knew who they were in connection to their land, in connection to their language, their ancestry, and they used that as a tool to really care for each other. The Natural Helpers program does come from that legacy of using what we have to really understand and support survivors in our community. I just did a lot of talking there.
Damon: No, thank you so much, Juan, for walking us through and sharing that precious story that is obviously so personal. I just want to say I'm sorry for your loss of your family. I know that grief and loss, this is a story from your childhood, but to continue to relive this with us in a way to honor your mother's legacy in the way that she showed up. I'm really moved by in respect and honor. I don't want to just rush into the conversation or into the next question and really take in what you shared with us because that is a tragic, horrible story that also is phenomenal, and magnificent and beautiful in some ways. Thank you for being so generous and sharing that with us.
Kalayo: I mean, I feel like this is our origin story. I do want to give a lot of space and honor to that along with Phoebe and Veronica. I think there were just so many fierce aunties at that time who realized that this was a huge system failure, there were already anti-violence organizations that exist, that they did not understand our culture and did not care deeply enough about the way in which violence happens to. Someone like Susana or other women mostly they were experiencing at the time. It was really a time when we were like, "No more." The aunties were like, "Whatever it takes, whoever we can bring into this, this is now like our fight." That really is how this organization started.
Damon: This is such a precious point of origin. I think I have a question out of how you named the story that I'm interested in from two perspectives. In the way that you name the loss for this community, the response was not just how do we respond? What are our tactics for interruption at the point of conflict and physical harm? The question you named time and time again is why does this happen? Which often in the face of this crisis folks don't have the space, or the wherewithal, or the bandwidth to hold just even conceiving of asking that question.
I'm very curious how y'all went about pursuing that inquiry. That's a big question that I'm sure has a bunch of sub-questions. What were some of the answers that emerged that you were able to hold? I'm curious about it from two different perspectives. One, Kalayo, you may be able to hold as an organization and as facilitators, and as the folks taking responsibility.
Derek, I'm really curious from your perspective as a five-year-old young person who is understanding yourself and the world through this tragic traumatic loss. Your existence is now being shaped by the pursuance of this question. We've talked a lot in this show in previous episodes about how do we make these movements and these conversations intergenerational. How do we talk to our young people?
We don't often center those who are impacted by the violence. We think of young people as just like passive spectators. As an organization, how did you all pursue asking that question, and what answers emerged? Derek, for you as a child learning about the world through asking this question, how did that shape your understanding?
Derek: It's a big question.
Damon: It's a big question, but bite off what you can.
Derek: I really appreciate that question, Damon. Thank you for asking. I will do my very best to think in my 33-year-old brain.
Kiss: It doesn't have to be when you were five, the years that followed.
Damon: It could be your retrospect on it.
Derek: I think it's really interesting to ask this question, especially as an adult. I think really anybody, but especially children when they experience trauma, it impacts the brain in such a way where sometimes when that child grows into adulthood, they may have blanks, like pieces of memory that have just been cut off from their life, pieces of their childhood that they can't recall. Part of that is a survival mechanism for people to continue to live their life as they hold this trauma. Not able to recollect is how trauma has impacted my own brain.
Maybe I'll have more memory 10 years from now. Maybe my body will say, okay, you're ready at this point, let's tap into that memory and allow you to feel that. Maybe right now my body's telling me, I don't know if you can remember that right now, however, I will share what I can remember. What I can share is that grief and trauma and violence was not talked about in my family even as it actively occurred throughout my childhood into my adulthood.
When this happened, my family didn't necessarily have the words for it. That's okay. We always don't have the words to describe our pain, especially within the context of already surviving America. Our family already experienced so much grief having to leave our homelands and to resettle here, and now this violent event happens, and now we're expected to make sense of it all. I think for the adults in my life, they're also trying to figure it out. Of course, young people learn from adults.
If adults in their life are not saying things and are having a hard time vocalizing or processing grief and trauma, they're going to reflect that back to their children. The children also they're not going to know how to use words, how to express their trauma. Personally, I would say that my family really had this force field around each other of numbness of not really talking about what actually happened, but really trying to tend to what's like, can we get food on the table? How are we going to get to school?
How are we going to maintain some sort of normalcy? No one told me your mother was murdered. My family is also really religious. A lot of the stories were cloaked with like, it was her time or she's sleeping now, or she's with God, or she's with Jesus. I'm like, "Okay, well, that's terrifying." [laughs] I'm like, "If being with Jesus means I'm no longer with the people who I love and who are supposed to protect me, then that's a really scary thing to imagine." That instilled a lot of religious fear.
However, I will say my family did the best they could. In regards to Susana's case, I didn't really learn about it until I was 12 or 13. When the internet was just coming out and people would go on AOL or MSN and type their name in and be like, oh, what comes up, I only still do that as an adult. When the internet was-- [laughs]
Kiss: We're all doing it, none of us are talking about- [crosstalk]
Derek: We're all Googling ourselves.
Kiss: We're all Googling ourselves.
Derek: I think this was when the internet came out, my school had like a new computer lab. Everyone went downstairs in the computer lab, was typing all social nonsense, typing in their names. I was like, "Okay, well, I'm going to do that too. I'm going to type in my name." Immediately the first thing that popped up was Phoebe dead, mother of three survived by three children, youngest Derek, five years old. I think for me I wasn't sure if I was ready for it. I was like this 13.
I clicked on it and it was a full article from the Seattle Times in detail what happened. I read it and I was really blown away of what I found. I now know a little bit more, but again, the adults in my life weren't necessarily talking about it. I kept it on the down low for a while. Fast forward like five or six years later when I'm in college, an undergrad, I'm at home and I find this little leaflet in the recycle bin and it's an invitation from the API Women and Family Safety Center.
It says like, "You are invited to this vigil to remember lives lost to domestic violence to honor Susana, Phoebe, and Veronica." I'm pretty sure my dad tossed it in the recycling bin. I knew of these visuals that were put on by the Women and Family Safety Center. My brother had spoken at it in years past, but I never attended myself. Something told me, when I was 19, when I pulled that leaflet out of the recycling bin that I should go see what this is all about, especially if it has to do with my mother's case, my mother's death.
I went to the vigil which is held at the King County Courthouse where their murders happened. I went by myself. I didn't tell anybody. The vigil itself is hosted in one of the chambers in the courtroom, not the exact chamber it happened, but in one of the courtrooms. I remember myself just intellectually understanding like, "Yes, this is where my mother died." It felt really important and really nerve wracking and anxiety-inducing to be there I think especially by myself.
I passed the metal detectors. I passed the plaque that has her name on it. I took the elevators up to whatever floor the visual was on, and I allowed myself to be in the back pew. It was really amazing. I saw people chanting, like remember Phoebe, remember Susana, remember Veronica. I was hearing people having active discussions about domestic violence, about sexual violence, about how we come together as a community to honor those who died, but also celebrate our collective survivorship.
There was food. There was a big old pollock. There was dance performances, speakers coming from my family who didn't talk about what had happened to my mom, but then entering this program where people were being very loud about it or talking openly and publicly about it, it really blew me away and it made me think, I need to get involved with this organization.
At the vigil they had advertised for the Natural Helpers program, and that's how I got connected to the organization. I don't think I mentioned this when I introduced myself, but I'm actually one of the community organizing program managers, but I started off as a natural helper about 12 years ago.
Kiss: So much of what this series has been is about finding different pathways for people to be invited into participation. One, just so grateful again for you sharing the particulars of your life and your path with it. I think part of where it's useful is, I think for many people grief is a pathway into participation in that non-linearity of that grief. It's really impactful when there's a container for people to step into.
Kalayo, whether as an individual or on the organizational side, someone had to build that vigil, someone had to get that food there, someone had to handle the permitting and the permissions and the get the dancers and all that, how do you think about creating the space for people who are confronting that grief to not even just transform it into action, but to hold it and take action from it?
Kalayo: The vigil is actually such a powerful catalyst. It's been happening every single year since the murders, and for the most part, it's been happening at the courthouse. Part of what some of the founders did was demand that we'd be given that space to mourn and to properly hold the grief in community.
This story has really woven in so many different stories of surviving in our communities for folks that we have lost and we still have to continue without them and for survivors that we've been able to support and are around or are now part of our ecosystem and part of supporting other survivors. That's almost all of us at API Chaya have survived gender-based violence.
For myself, it was in childhood within my family where there was violence towards my mother, myself, and my siblings. I remember going to my first vigil and I remember I went to actually a parenting support group, which is also one of the origins of the Natural Helpers. I was doing childcare for the kids. I remember being like, "Oh, these kids are like me and my siblings." I started as a volunteer coordinator and thus was entrusted with this Natural Helpers program. There's always stories that come up, because a lot of times you're like, "I don't even know that that's what was happening in my family. I just came to this training to support other people."
Then you're like, "This is something that I wish my family would've had." That happens so much. Whether it's during or right after the trainings, so much of our work is holding the stories, holding the grief, holding the loss, but also the resilience of our communities and being able to respond in such a loving way to be able to feel like as somebody who has been impacted by this, I want to figure out how to keep this from happening again. I want to support a survivor in my life, and I want us to be able to have something that didn't exist for our families, for the people that we've lost.
There's just something that continues from the place of when Phoebe received that call and was like, "I don't know this person, but she's from where I'm from." That is API Chaya now. It's like we may not personally know the person going through it when we receive a call, or when a friend pulls us into conversation about something. We know that person may be from the same place I am geographically or just something that I've also been through, and we can respond as such. We have that connection.
Kiss: I love that as a root of what we can do from there is a beautiful thing.
Damon: I honor this work so much. Have recently been in a lot of conversations about the spiritual dimensions of our movements, and how central grief is to our collective humanity. One, the compounded harm that happens when there's not proper space made for grief, but two, the generative possibilities when we actually approach grief collectively and culturally and communally. In hearing y'all tell this origin story, and if I'm just doing the math of Derek's life, we're about 27, 28 years of continuing this ritual and this practice and tradition.
We're going on 30 years which is a generation of honoring and continuing to gather, and have now been impacting for a generation so many lives in your community. I have such reverence for that. With that reverence I ask this question, you're naming these trainings as at the forefront of what is the offering to community. There are going to be many people listening to this that are not in Seattle and may not be in Seattle on a training day. Obviously, there's things we can't replicate not being together and going through the process, but are there components, knowledge, takeaway, key points from the training that you want to make sure that folks get, that we could offer to folks who may listen to this conversation to be in the lineage of this legacy of grief and ritual that y'all community has built? What's going on in the training, is the simple version of that big question.
Kalayo: Sure. A big part of it is just breaking down the messaging that we have around violence and where it stems from. Many of us get a lot of messaging around, "I think your culture is inherently violent and thus that must be the reason why there's so much domestic violence in your culture." We're like, "Oh, no, no, no." Really we have a rich history of all of these things in our cultures. Part of that is our ability to actually respond to different forms of violence that have been put upon us, and to support each other as we make it through. Whether it's the village. Whether it's coming to another country, et cetera.
In so many ways, I think our parents or our families have been doing their best with what we've been given. Even in situations where, yes, we want the violence to end. A lot of times we don't want that person to go away. We want the person to recognize their behavior, and have other people talk to that person to be like, "Hey, that's not okay," and some change to happen. I think growing our ability to hold space for complexity. Hold space for like, so much shit is going on in our world. That's part of the reason why that's showing up in this way in our family, in our household.
That we want to make sure that they can understand that this is not their fault, because that's so much of what we internalize when we grow up in these homes. It's like we're doing something that's causing this violence to happen to us. It's important to have a way to recognize that like, okay, these are some reasons why it's happening and it's not our fault. A Natural Helper really like out in the world. If you think about someone who works at a church, or someone who works at a salon or even your bartender when you're talking to someone about it is really just holding space.
Affirming and reflecting like, "Hey, this is happening to you. This is really sad that it's happening to you and it shouldn't be happening to you. Let's figure out what resources out there we have that are within reach." I think want to make sure that I honor the fact API Chaya is a merged organization of the safety center in Chaya, and within the South Asian communities, a lot of the similar things were happening at the same time. In the mid-90s and in our recalling of this particular history, there are also similar conversations that were happening that led to the formation of Chaya and so much of their work is actually within Muslim communities. It's called the Peaceful Families Project.
It's also another really powerful example of how communities come together. It's very similar to the Natural Helpers where now it exists all in one place. I just want to say that because part of what I think is really powerful about this model is that we're using our culture and our cultural values or we're using our faith and our faith values that we really want to live by, and we're creating ways to respond to violence is really in line with that. Derek, he first came on as a Natural Helper, but then actually became our visual organizer which is really wild if you think about it.
It's like from what you heard about his first experience and his first visual became our visual organizer and actually came up with this current name of it, which is Kapwa. I'll let you tell more about it, Derek. I think it just so much of what the spirit is of our work now as API Chaya and what the Natural Helpers model is.
Derek: Thanks, Kalayo, for explaining that. I'm having this moment again when we open the space of where you're in the world, and I was talking about how the world is going fast. I'm just thinking about my relationship with Kalayo and how, dang, we've known each other for a while and now we're just here on a podcast. Like, what the fuck? It's like one of those moments where you're speaking about an experience, but you're also replaying the moments in time that have led up to it.
Damon: I'm sorry, just in that time if my math is correct, you're coming to the vigil, is where practically that was the midpoint if I'm not mistaken. I think that was 14 years after the event, and then that was 14 years ago?
Kiss: Wow. After we said we're not good at science you're just over here doing discipline subtractions.
Damon: Oh, I'm great on the arithmetic side. It's when you start giving me all the worksheets, I'm good.
Derek: Your math is mathing. Next year is our 29th anniversary of the vigil. Then 2025 will be the 30th anniversary of the vigil, which would be the 30th anniversary of the murders. As Kalayo was mentioning, we have named the vigil Kapwa. Kapwa is the center of Filipino indigenous psychology. That's spelled K-A-P-W-A. It means the shared interconnectedness among in between beings and envisioning the self and the other. The root word of kapwa is puwang, which is P-U-W-A-N-G. Puwang literally means space. We can think of kapwa as the spaces which we inhabit that facilitate the sense of interconnection of understanding that my life is connected to your life because your life is connected to mine.
My life is connected to a million years before and a million years ahead of me across space and time. We wanted to name the visualists because that's how we understand survivorship, that it's not done in solitude. It's done as a community. It's experienced as interconnectedness. The vigil serves as a place and moment in time where we can feel into each other's grief, feel into each other's sorrow, feel into each other's collective survivorship in hopes that that's where that transformation can happen.
When you can understand that your grief is interconnected with mine, because we've experienced similar violences, experienced similar losses, then the narrative and the stories transform with how we create meaning from these experiences.
I think that's where cultural work is so important because that is how we facilitate the sense of interconnection of kapwa through celebrating our culture and using the tools that our ancestors gave us as a way to prevent violence to happen, as a way to connect to one another, as a way to have hard conversations. I should also mention that I'm a grief therapist. My trajectory in my life has pushed me from doing visual organizing, youth prevention work to-- I went to grad school and did all that stuff, and now I'm a grief therapist. There's an aspect of grief counseling which is called restorative retelling.
It's a model of grief therapy which allows the griever to retell the story in the face of a violent loss. What happens when we experience violence and traumatic grief in our life is that it takes away our agency. It takes our way of being in that story because now the story is in the hands of somebody else's determination over who we are as a person, over our bodies, or over our people in regards to systems. Restorative retelling offers this framework of how do we then retell our experiences of loss and grief? How do we create meaning of it? We do so by inserting-- reinserting ourselves in the dying story, allowing ourself to relieve that pain so that we can tell where we are in the story.
That's why I so appreciated the opening of our time together. It's like, "Where are we in this world?" Because that's what this movement calls of us to do. It calls us to reimagine ourselves in our pain and then retell a different story. I think that's what we do at API Chaya, is we use prevention as a way to retell our stories so that our cultures can change. When I say cultural work, I don't mean it as a fixed tool that our ancestors have given us. I want us to think about cultural work as a very malleable piece of clay that was given to us or my ancestors, and we can form to what's relevant.
That's how we retell our story, is that we reform and reform and reshape ourselves so that we can find meaning in our losses. I believe that's where transformation can happen. When we begin to live in the retelling of who we want to be and how we want to reconnect in this world. We really are imagining new worlds here and recreating and retelling how we want to continue our culture, and then that will continue to be passed on, hopefully, to future generations.
Kiss: Yes. I love this idea of imagining and creating new worlds by retelling the stories that brought you to the present. It leads me back to something that was mentioned earlier, which is in the 90s, as these conversations are starting, there being a real deepening understanding of the relationship between imperialism and gender-based violence. I'm wondering, in doing that culture work, that retelling, how that piece of the story, that framing of the story has been reshaped either for you all or when talking with other people within your community.
How has the work of addressing how partners address violence between themselves changed the way people understand the trajectory of a colonial past, and the remainder is the strands that don't disappear from that?
Kalayo: Yes, so many of the stories that we've shared and also held with others is migration, usually force on some level after wars or just large-scale resource extraction of the people we're from. In the Philippines specifically, it's labor that they're extracting. Many of us are here as workers and experiencing not just the loss of land and culture, but this isolation that we've never experienced before because it's not where we're from. In the isolation and in the shame too of not seeing ourselves reflecting in the same way around us, and the messages that were less than in this land.
Many of us come even with advanced degrees and then come here and do really essential caring labor, but for very little pay and with very little dignity. I think really like the isolation and the shame really plays so much into how the violence happens within our home and our households. The silence continues. Like in Derek's family, that was a big part of just the aftermath of that traumatic event. In my family, similarly to this day, I think nobody brings up what happened in our family, right? I do, but generally, nobody brings it up unless something terrible happens. Then we don't have an entry point to that again.
It's actually really important to understand-- it's like for me, for myself to understand systemically what brought me and my family to this place here in the United States, but also surviving this violence that happened for my father with very little understanding or material support or resources as new immigrants. That's so much of the communities that we serve now.
They had to leave or even they were trafficked here. Then they're in the aftermath of this violence. They're trying to find humanity. They're trying to figure out their new relationship to their family and their new roles here in this place. All we can really do is hold stories and connect people to resources, even without the systems that are so hard to navigate. That we can figure out like, hey, maybe this person can help with childcare, or maybe this person can help bring over a meal or whatever it is just until the survivor figures something out.
One other point I want to bring in is about food, because, as you can imagine, so many of these initial conversations happen around kitchen tables, around living rooms, talking over food. That's such a big part of our Natural Helpers training, such a big part of the visual. It's just making sure that there is enough food to feed everybody, because there is the healing component of eating a lot of really good food together for so many of our cultures. It makes everything possible. It makes this hard conversation possible.
It makes the space possible. Our cultural comfort food is one of-- I think, both me and Derek's favorite thing to do during the Natural Helpers training, and now, it's just figuring out what food we could provide for people to be able to hold this conversation and to be able to be present with each other.
Kiss: For sure. This is going to sound a little trite, but I mean it in the gravitas of what you just gave for it. Are there particular cultural comfort foods that you found? Obviously, it depends on the person, but people are more likely to open up when this is on the table or more likely to feel comfortable because not every dish is made equally even within someone's home cuisine.
Kalayo: It's true. I don't know, people might fight me about this.
[laughter]
Kiss: Or I'll speak. You can speak for you, but I'm curious -
Damon: - for the controversy.
Kalayo: [chuckles] I'll throw down. I think there's always some kind of-- in the Philippines, it's...or like congee or something like that that I think is very comforting. A lot of times has ginger in it. I think there's the aromatics. I think there's something about it that also is like foods that we want to have when we're sick too, because that's part of it. It's like healing. This is our favorite check-in question because we all find out what your comfort food is, and if possible, we will figure out a way to get that into the meeting. Because that's how important it is for people to feel like seeing in that, something that it really brings comfort to you and brings healing.
You hear your language being spoken, or you see yourself, your culture represented here. That just really allows the space for people to feel a little bit at home as they are experiencing a loss of home, because that's so much of what gender-based violence is, is a loss of home.
Damon: You all have one answered one of the bigger questions I've had already, so I just want to respond to what I've already heard be named and then maybe offer space to invite folks into the work or into the resources, if at all possible. One thing I came in with a curiosity or my own hypothesis around, and you all have spoke to, is this notion of cultural lineage. For folks who are listening to this show and to this series, so much of it is about creating new worlds or new systems. Often when folks drill down into the operations or mechanics of that, so much of it is rooted in reconnection or rediscovery, or the creation of the new is connecting to these ancient practices.
In my context, often restorative and transformative justice are prisomed through these legacies of African and native indigenous practices. I was really curious to hear how for the API diaspora, engaging in this movement, working in this restorative work, does that exist in parallel? The answer to me feels like yes. Like I'm hearing deeply the way this interconnectedness, I am because we are type of philosophy exists, and my feeling is exists globally, and Western imperialism and colonialism has been organized to attempt to destroy that all over the planet. We are seeing these diasporas recreate and re-gather the fragments and build anew upon that to address safety and to rebuild community and to respond to harm and violence and to create new relationships.
One thing I just heard this weekend is we talk a lot about storytelling, and I love how you say the way we work towards prevention and stopping future harm is by telling story of the past, but also it doesn't stop at storytelling, like story creation. Derek is not just telling the story of his mother's legacy. He's actively creating the story that he is telling and naming. The way you also talked about the racist stigmatization of your culture of being named as inherently violent. As Black people, particularly Black people in Chicago, we get this tag of being inherently violent and always trying to work through that language or that stigma.
As I hear you all name your work and your story to us, I'm feeling so much connection and honor as we are exploring and mapping out all of these experiments to see these global connections in this land through this diaspora. Thank you all for naming that and illuminating all those profound truths for me. Yes, I want to give space for folks who are maybe in the region, in Seattle specifically, who want to support, who want to learn more, who want to connect, who are moved by this conversation or by y'all's work. What are the ways in which you all want folks connecting with the work of Natural Helpers?
Kalayo: During the pandemic, actually, our Natural Helpers training was nationwide because you can join. That could happen. What I think is remarkable about it, and its many iterations because it has shifted so much as you can imagine, it's been almost 30 years that it has existed. Big shout out to just like, especially I think Emma Catague, who I think really developed the Natural Helpers model and other folks that were part of that. It's been something that we've been adapting to community needs over time. It's actually taking place in all kinds of settings, including within prisons, when we do Natural Helpers trainings in there too. We really just invite you to connect with us.
If you're not in Seattle, think about sending a person to the Natural Helpers training so that they can bring it back to the community. Priya and I actually did a train the trainers. It's something that is so needed overall in our movement. Violence is happening all the time, and specifically, violence that we don't talk about or give a lot of space for, but when it happens, it tends to interrupt our movement altogether. Or it doesn't, but it has a very real consequence if it's not responded to.
We really just encourage people who care about transformative justice and abolition to really understand what it is that survivors go through and what it means to support survivors and how that is actually such a building piece of movement and of creating different possibilities of our world. Connect with us. Our website is apichaya.org. We're mostly on Instagram these days as @apichayasea. Yes, we'll be here continuing to do this work.
Kiss: That's beautiful. I have one last question, which is part of our fraught metaphor. Bear with us. Thank you all for your time. If someone were coming to you all not to replicate the same model, but to build off of what you all have made, someone's interested in building something similar in that spirit of the experiment being replicated. What do you feel like people really need to know as they step into trying to do this work maybe for the first time for them?
Derek: I feel like assessing what you already have. What are the tools that you have? What are the resources that are around you? Who is in your community? Like Kalayo was talking about your barber, the person at the grocery store, that auntie that you see at the park feeding the ducks, these are all people in your community that are well-resourced. Everybody has a certain gift. Everybody has some connection and tool that they can offer your training or your community. Thinking about where you can draw from, from the environment, from your ecosystem, from yourself, from your own experiences, I think that's a great place to start.
Kalayo: One piece on that. Really starting with that self-reflection piece. This work is not easy, like a lot of the work that we choose, and it requires some amounts of just emotional presence and stamina. That's really assessing where you are in terms of your own experience of violence or trauma or whatever it is. Not that that needs to be a barrier or that should stop you, but it's just really understanding that for yourself, that you want to be aware of what you're bringing into the space and what you're bringing other people into.
If you're forming a new group or forming your own projects, actually, that self-reflection can also bring into what is your gift, what you are able to offer that really feels essential for you. I think that's really a place I want everybody to start in doing any work that's meaningful for them, in doing it in a way that feels good and continuing. We want to see you here. We want to continue to see you here.
Kiss: Thank you for the contribution and the gifts, and the resource, and the brilliance that you all brought to this conversation. Yes, it's been a joy to spend some time with you.
Damon: Yes, thank you. It's really an honor to learn this story.
Kalayo: Thank you all so much.
[music]
Damon: All right, it's time for our peer review, which means we got to welcome Eva back into the lab. Eva, what an amazing story. What are some of the things that you are taking or picking up from this conversation with Natural Helpers?
[music]
Eva: There's a couple of things that Kalayo and Derek said that meant a lot to me and I think embodied the ethos and mission, talking about the organizing as a making and remaking of home. I love when they said the aunties are like, whatever it takes. That is API Chaya, is the auntie saying whatever it takes. That there are these hyperlocal networks, the kinds of things that we like to feature on the show that are tied to hyperlocal networks transnationally. This very tight-knit community of organizing that has been growing and sustained in Seattle since the 1980s is born out of organizing that is growing and sustained as a Philippines for much longer than that, of the family ties, the community ties, the village ties.
It's such a demonstration of what we can do ourselves, the resources, the energy, the community that we can find with each other, and also how that supports deep professionalization and centering of experience and expertise in our organizations. I really appreciate all the heart that was brought to the interview and how that is what API Chaya is. Against all odds, imperialism, colonialization, gender-based violence, we find this group of people who just bring so much joy and energy to this space and to the work that they do.
Damon: It really was so moving. I have some deep takeaways, but I think one of the things that's coming to the top is just the power of effective storytelling and just the admiration I have for Derek as how he facilitates people into this work. He could have just come on mic and said, "Yes, I'm an organizer. I lost my mother. She was supporting someone surviving gender-based violence. Then when I got to college, I joined the organization." In the way in which he took us through that narrative, and it wasn't until a few seconds before we got to the courtroom that I even realized what was happening and the importance of who I was talking to and how this was-
Kiss: We didn't know coming into the interview either.
Damon: Yes, and so how this was shaping his whole life, and so by the time he gets to the impact of the loss on him, or he's shown us the picture of his mother, I am brought to that place, which is what's really needed for folks to move and to activate. You have to touch the human elements of what this means and the real empathy to mobilize people. Yes, that really stuck with me. Then in the story, the way time works, and I realized it as we were interviewing, doing my little weird arithmetic, but we're talking to him 14 years after he joined the work, and he joined the work 14 years after losing his mother. There's something just feeling like cosmic about that.
From a deeper organizing lesson, just the dedication of folks to maintain that space for 14 years and what that consistency made possible. I think about the context of how I enter movement. We have passed 10 years of the Trayvon, Martin murder and verdict. We have approaching 10 years of the Mike Brown murder and the Ferguson uprising. We are at the decade point, and I see how, myself included, folks feel weary, but if you stop at 10 years, if you stop at 11 years, if you stop at 13 years, Derek never enters that room. Even just realizing that right now, just the honor I have for that community's dedication to keep that room going for 14 years, to be a space to receive him, is really just mind-blowing.
Kiss: That they didn't do it because he said, "Oh, I want to come and I'm ready to show up."
Damon: Right. They didn't even know he was there.
Kiss: They were going to be there doing what they do regardless, and then he happened to choose to sit in the back of the room that year. I think it's a real testament to what consistency makes possible, especially as we're talking about these experiments that are a year to three to five years old to see a space that has been built across decades and how the work can shift and evolve and form new partnerships and all that good stuff, but the consistency makes it possible for people to find it when they're ready for it.
That seems like a good lesson for people who are building the scale of what they do is what can you do that you can sustain until the people who need it are ready for it. Any other takeaways? I really love the little food throw in at the end there and that the food that makes everyone feel most comfortable is like a warm soup, porridge stew situation that warms you from the inside out. That feels like a real cross-cultural international organizing tactic that I think everyone could take and use when needed.
Damon: If Daniel had his way, he could turn every show into a food show, so I know that that really warmed your tummy up.
[laughter]
Eva: True.
Kiss: I didn't know what the answer to the question would be and it was the perfect answer is like.
Damon: Absolutely.
Kiss: Yes, like a congee, a thick broth into something that just warms your core from matzo balls to congee and everything in the middle.
Eva: It's always the answer. I think to go back to this vigil that's been going on since the early nineties that it is still a space for people who have been together grieving since that time to invite new people in and to sustain collective action. I don't know what the recipe for the soup is that API Chaya has developed over there. I think we're getting little inklings of it. These relationships, these meals, these vigils, this real emphasis on people learning who they are through these stories, being able to tell these stories to each other and create new stories together. I think that there is some secret soup ingredient in API Chaya Natural Helpers.
Damon: Yes. You talk about this secret soup. I'm just thinking of like this global pot, [laughs] this global soup stirring that's been happening all over the world and it brings me to just like a deepening connection to how we think of revolution. As us making the show, I'm sure many folks listening to this show hope for or are participating in a transformative restorative ethic towards revolutionary change. When you think of these restorative practices, at the highest form of restorative justice is grief work. When we really talk about what we have to restore, it is not just the harms that our people have survived. It is healing and repairing and transforming from that which has not survived and that which has been taken from us.
I named it a little bit in the conversation, but it really felt like a privilege because we think of the word revolution and it comes to mean creating anew, but really at its root it means a return. Often that return is contextualized in certain folk or indigenous traditions, but I did not have as much an understanding or connection to the Asian and Pacific Island restorative tradition that I knew was there, but I was not informed of how that is still present in the work today, and so just thinking about this notion of all over the world, humans knew how to do this work that we need to recover and it is in this reconnecting and these coalition type spaces and having conversations like this that we're able to see the world that we want to build exist in these auntie networks or exist in these indigenous pathways throughout the world if we open ourselves and tune our channel to receive it.
When I think of the process of revolution and transforming, it just felt like an honor to connect to comrades that are also engaged in that tradition but have their own cultural lineage that is sustaining that work.
Kiss: Yes, absolutely. Maybe it's a takeaway for our listeners. Call your aunt, see what she has to say.
[laughter]
Kiss: No promises, but it can't hurt.
Damon: There's some people like, not my auntie, their aunts.
[laughter]
Eva: Drink the soup. Take the ride.
Damon: Yes.
Kiss: Call your aunt. Here we go.
Damon: Call your aunt. [laughs]
Kiss: All right, Joe. I feel like the peer review has been done. Eva, where can folks find out more about API Chaya and the Natural Helpers?
Eva: You can always find out more at API Chaya, that's C-H-A-Y-A .org.
Kiss: Also, they're on the One Million Experiments site, correct?
Eva: Yes. You can also visit millionexperiments.com where you can listen to this episode, explore more about the organization and what else?
Kiss: You can see the trailer for our new film One Million Experiments, which is now at millionexperiments.com, and keep an eye out for info about screenings and all that good stuff, but get your little sneak peek of this film that we made. It's really cool.
Damon: If you like the show, you should like the movie. [laughs]
Kiss: I would be really surprised if they were like, "No, this is where I draw the line."
Damon: [laughs] I stop at the audio. [laughs]
Kiss: Exactly. All right. We got that down. Where else can folks plug into the work of interrupting criminalization?
Eva: Visit us on all the socials at the Boys Make Fun of Me, Interrupt Crim or Million Experiments.
Kiss: We're at Ergo Radio on all socials, ergoradio.com. You can also check out our new Movement Media Ecosystem Hub with Respair Production Media at respairmedia.com. With that, I think we're good to go. We'll be back in the lab next month with another experiment, but until then.
Damon: Much love to the people.
Kiss: Peace.