In the second half of our exciting conversation with the electric and wise Patty Krawec we talk about language, theoretical physics, pyro-epistemology, stones, stories and white supremacy.
Patty Krawec is an Anishinaabe/Ukrainian writer and speaker belonging to Lac Seul First Nation in Treaty 3 territory and residing in Niagara Falls. She has served on the board of the Fort Erie Native Friendship Centre and co-hosted the Medicine for the Resistance podcast. Patty is a founding director of the Nii’kinaaganaa Foundation which challenges settlers to pay their rent for living on Indigenous land and then disburses those funds to Indigenous people, meeting immediate survival needs as well as supporting the organizing and community building needed to address the structural issues that create those needs.Patty has a background in social work, supporting victims of sexual and gendered violence as well as child abuse. A strong believer in the power of collective organizing, Patty was an active union member throughout her career as a social worker.
Her current work and writing focuses on how Anishinaabe belonging and thought can inform faith and social justice practices and has been published in Sojourners, Rampant Magazine, Midnight Sun, Yellowhead Institute, Indiginews, Religion News Service, and Broadview.
Her first book, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future was published in 2022 by Broadleaf Books. Her second book, Bad Indians Book Club: Reading At The Edge of a Thousand Worlds, is about the ways that marginalized writing and storytelling can help us reimagine that future will be published in the fall of 2025. She lives on the bluesky @daanis.ca and you can find her online at daanis.ca
Transcript
Patty Krawec - Part2
[00:00:00] Amy: If you want to support The Missing Witches Project, join the coven. Find out how@missingwitches.com. Or buy our books, new Moon Magic and Missing Witches, and check out the Missing Witches deck of Oracles.
[00:00:14] You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. Witch, witch, witch, witch, witch, witch, witch.
You must be a witch.
Patty: How many times have we picked up a book and found this kind of nebulous thing in our head? Articulated so beautifully on the page, and that was what I really hoped becoming kin would do for indigenous people. Not that I thought I had anything to teach them because I didn't grow up with my Ojibwe community, but I hoped it would give them language to be able to address the things that they did know.
You know, reading can do that for us. It can validate us, it teaches us other ways of seeing the world. I will often read intentionally. That sounds silly. Of course we read intentionally, but I mean like knowing the things that I don't know. Then deciding to do, well, let's just read, and not just one book about white nationalism, which is what I'm reading right now, but let's read lots of books and get lots of different perspectives.
I'm not interested in the perspectives of the powerful. I feel like I'm surrounded by those perspectives constantly. I don't need to give them 50% of my time. I don't need to give them 50% of my brain. I need to read from all the marginalized pupils. How do black women understand this and not just allowing one author to speak on behalf of all black women, but lots of them.
That's the internal piece. But when we read collectively, when we read in book clubs, when we read, when our friend and I decide, you know, we're gonna read the same book and then talk about it, that moves us to action. That moves us to not just imagining a different world, but thinking about how we can put these ideas into practice.
And we can do that with fiction as well. Fiction is really powerful because it offers us alternatives. What if the water had agency, what would it be doing? In the years before slavery was abolished, people taught slaves to read. They, they weren't allowed to read because reading changes us, particularly when we read collectively.
I dunno. My writing keeps being described as generous and invitational. I don't often feel that way. I often feel very angry, but our movements do need joy and they do need welcome. And if that's a risk, that's a risk. We're just gonna have to take it because why would we build a world nobody wants to live in?
[00:02:33] Risa: I think if you can balance. Angry and generous. You've really, you've really found a voice. I know how I do. A lot of us.
[00:02:43] Patty: I can't give a workshop on that. I'm like, no, I did that. That might be part of, that Might be down to my editor, but she's never asked me to take out anything that sounded overly hostile.
If anything, some of the hostility was encouraged by her. So it's, it's not like I became generous because the white lady softened me on a day of being really annoyed. I referred to myself in the, the text as a Bad Indian. She highlighted and said, this might make a great title. At which point I had to basically rework the book to thread the Bad Indians theme through the whole book.
Oh,
[00:03:19] Risa: yeah. No, I never find it hostile. I mean, I think for myself at least, like I'm very aware, as aware as I can be, I guess at this point in my life of how white feminism works in me. And it like, I'm really thankful for when I can get it called out so that I can like take it off is another level. You know, like you, when you, once you see it.
Maya Angelou said, you know better, you do better. You know, once you see it, you're sort of like, okay, let get that off my neck then and stop being such a douche bag. Maybe I can do something a bit better,
[00:03:59] Patty: you know? Well, yeah. I mean, and we're all raised in this, right? Like, it's in the TV shows we watch and the books, you, you know, the mass market books that we read, it's, it's everywhere.
So of course, I'm kind of be constantly picking white supremacy and gender binaries out of my life. It's the soup I was raised in. And so of course I'm gonna be constantly unpicking that. And I am so grateful for people who have taken the time to correct me. And I often say, you know, when somebody takes that time, that's such a gift.
It means they believe in you. It means they believe that you want to do better, that you don't want to cause the harm that you're causing. And sure you get defensive sometimes 'cause you're like, fuck. But I can also push through that. And say, okay, you know what? Thank you. Thank you. I'm gonna, I'm, I'm gonna readjust my thinking a bit.
'cause 'cause we have to, we have to. Otherwise we're not gonna survive together. That's like the theme, like when I do keynotes and stuff, surviving together is kind of the general theme that I bring to the table because we survive together or not at all if we don't get our shit together and start.
Looking past ideological differences, or maybe we don't all want the same end goal, but there are things in the meantime that we can agree on, and let's work on those things. You know, Ruth Wilson Gilmore tells an amazing story in Golden Gulags about forming a coalition against prison building that included people who weren't abolitionists, but they all agreed that a prison in this town was not gonna be good for that town.
They didn't have to all agree on everything in order to achieve this common goal. And along the way they learned stuff from each other and some of them became abolitionists along the way and others did not. And that's okay. That's okay because we survived together.
[00:05:52] Risa: I was really excited by this piece.
You wrote who we listened to matters. Theoretical physicist and activist and Prescott Weinstein has spoken and written extensively about the ways in which dominant science is enmeshed with white supremacy, which assumes a particular way of being in the world. The Disordered Cosmos, a journey into dark matter, FaceTime and Dreams deferred Prescott Weinstein reflects on the work of particle physicist, quantum theorist and feminist theorist Karen Barad American, who wrote that.
While Quantum Mechanics challenges the idea that the universe can be broken down into separately knowable parts, physicists have yet to allow this lesson to impact their approach to thinking through what we call the most fundamental basic objects in the universe. Quantum Physics Brad Notes is the purview of primarily Western trained males.
As a result, Prescott Weinstein suggests that what we know will stay incomplete until we are able to think beyond the ways that white men are trained to think bad Indians like Hannah Burgess, who proposed writing a dissertation without citing any white men, know that without us. It is in incomplete, but despite knowing better, these white male theorists have decided that certain things can be broken down into separately knowable parts and that they know them.
In this conversation about science, Ben brought up the work of Lawrence Gross and the quantum nature of the Anishinabe language, which orients around verbs and process rather than nouns. Prescott Weinstein reflected that while English is very useful for something that may not be the most useful language for everything.
What could be known about quantum physics and the world we inhabit is scientists had access to language that reflected the processes they study, the language we used to study the world around us shapes what we're able to learn. And it may be that subaltern scientists and the quantum nature of their language hold a key to that.
Knowing
[00:07:48] Patty: what that made me think about it was. Early. No, no surprise. Early in my academic life, I studied history. I, I've always loved history and if you want to study history, one of my early professors, that was when I went to university and basically played uker, but I did show up for some classes. You talked about how you have to learn other languages if you're going to read old texts, right?
Like if you're gonna read about medieval Germany, you're gonna have to learn old German. If you're gonna learn about plant at England, which was what I was interested in, you're going to have to learn middle English. So why can't physicists learn or Lakota, or these other languages that will help them think in a more quantum way, right?
If historians have to learn other languages to do their research, why can't physicists learn other languages to do their research? I mean, the way we talk and the way we assume things about the world around us. Does impact how we see it. I think because Hebrew, and again, I, I keep coming back to this because I was raised evangelical, and so I feel like I still have this deep relationship with the church, even though I'm mostly mad at it because it could do so much.
There's so much liberatory potential that is just being wasted in the name of Christian nationalism and this like terrible apocalyp division that I grew up in, like the Hebrew is also verb based and relationally oriented. Not exclusively verb based, the way ish NABE moan is, 'cause I've talked to some people who speak Hebrew, um, about that.
But there is a large emphasis on relations. And so to me, what I look at the languages and then the political systems that evolved alongside those languages, not as a result of, but also alongside it makes sense why the Anishnabe developed this kind of egalitarian, non-hierarchical society. Which is basically an anarchist.
My son likes to say, if they didn't like what some leader was saying, they would just wander off and listen to somebody else. They didn't even fight him. They were just like, dude, you're whack. They'd go off and listen to somebody else and Shawnee the Mohawks. Innu a little more, a little more hierarchical, structured, but balanced with gender.
Not in the separate but equal homelands way, but in a way that really mitigates the abuse of power by one group over another. And so it makes sense. A language and a political system, or a way of scientific inquiry because our knowledge is also a form of scientific inquiry, of asking questions about how things work, positing solutions, testing those solutions, and then making decisions around agriculture like farm is great.
Try to create a whole permaculture forest. That's a lot of work. That's the world that these so-called primitive hunter gatherers lived in was vast permaculture forests. That's a lot of work to create and maintain, right? It's valuable, valuable knowledge, but it emerged alongside a language that prioritizes relations over discreet objects and what we do with those discreet objects.
And so of course we're going to have a different relationship with the world. Then a language and a political and a scientific system that emerged out of a way of looking at discreet objects. And I love the stories contained in our language, but those stories are also contained in English. My grandma had like this great thick book, my German grandma, this great thick book about etymology and how language developed.
And like charming, right? Charm used to be, ooh, you wouldn't wanna be charming. 'cause that was basically an accusation of witchcraft and now it's not. Language changes and tracking those changes. And so it's really interesting. I think that it gives us kind of a, a glimpse into deep history as well when we think about how language developed and it helps us look at how that history kind of.
Shaped who we become.
[00:11:42] Risa: Can you give some of the, maybe examples in the book or just examples you can think of to help us understand what you mean when you say it's a process-based language?
[00:11:52] Patty: Yeah, so my shirt, I wouldn't say in moan, and again, I mean, I'm not a language speaker, but I wouldn't say that my shirt is gray and blue.
I would say that it's being gray and blue. That's what it's doing right now. And we all know that if we put it in a washing machine, if we accidentally drop it in with the whites, it will no longer, it will be being something else, you know, which is a way of, of, of understanding, you know, that stuff doesn't stay in a permanent state.
It shifts and it, it can be something else. We can also be something else. But even like anin. Isn't just, hello. It's kind of like I'm here. Pay attention to me. It's like announcing your presence. So where Hello is, you know, kind of like our standard greeting of Hello Anin is more action. I'm here. I'm asserting my presence in this space is what it, you know, is what it means.
You know, Bain is, you know, the good life. It's a goal that encompasses, you know. Spiritual development as well as social relations. You know, I'm trying to live a good life. We don't have a word for fiction, but we do have a way of saying, these are the stories we just made up. You know, or these are the scary story, like it says what they are, as opposed to, you know, kind of a discreet thing.
I don't know. I'm probably not explaining that very well.
[00:13:13] Risa: No, you totally are. And it's so cool to connect it to exactly that duality in physics, you know, between a particle and a wave or to, to say that we've over-focused on the particularness of things in, in part because our language and our political systems really want things to be.
Definite and separate and isolated and individualist and that, you know, physicists have discovered that there is a wave property to things. But have we really bent our minds to thinking about the implications of the wave property of things? And maybe to do that we need. A different language. I like a, a much more ancient language, like there's a reason why maybe it can see the way nature of things.
Can you talk about Paul to use and, and the word for North?
[00:14:04] Patty: Oh yeah. Edin. So this first came to me, I heard Josh Manitou, he's a prophet Rock university, also Ojibwe from Manito Island. He was in at some conference I had gone to and he was talking about den. Our word for north and that it contains the idea of glaciers going home.
And that was just mind blowing to me. It was like, how did they know about glaciers? Because if the glaciers are going home. Then we knew that they had not always been there.
[00:14:35] Risa: It doesn't just go back to the glaciers being here, which is like 13,000 years ago. That's right. Or whatever, 11. It goes back to before they were here.
That's
[00:14:44] Patty: right. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, there's our stories about this word and what it means, include knowledge, that they hadn't always been there, that they had come down and gone back home again. That there was a place that they belonged and that they hadn't always been there. So that was just completely mind blowing to me that our, not only did our word contained that history, but that our elders knew that history, that when they could talk about that word, they un they knew what that word meant and they knew the story of that word, that it doesn't just mean north, it means the glaciers going home.
And then Dr. Paulette Steves, who's a Metis paleontologist. She argues. So first this idea was that we were only here for the last 3000 years and then they, you know, kind of grudgingly admitted it may have been a little bit longer than that. And she's basically, no, we have been here for an extremely long time, probably a hundred thousand years.
And the only reason that we don't find the evidence is 'cause we're not looking for the evidence. And she talks about archeologists who have tried to put forward ideas of settlements that were 30 and 40,000 years old, which completely give the, you know, give the lie to the bearing Strait theory. Breia was a continent.
People did travel across it somewhat. They might have gone the other way too. Who knows? But we didn't all come that way. Because there is evidence with the footprints found at White Sands National Park. She talked about archeologists that basically got drummed out of the institution for suggesting that we had been here for more than 10,000 years.
Now we know that we have been, and those footsteps can't be accounted for by the timeframe of the Bearing Strait Theory. And also the Bering Strait wasn't all that passable anyway, so people did live there. But this column between glaciers, like how are you gonna travel that? Right? Like a whole lot of no man's land for generations.
Like no, absolutely not. But we know people did travel. Maybe they came by boat. People in the Pacific have more extraordinary navigators. So who's to say they didn't come here and teach us? I have no beef with migration and movement. Absolutely not. But this is where we emerged as people, and we emerged here a very long time ago.
We're not just other settlers who colonized the place, right? This is where we emerged as people and you know, and so when Paulette does her work and the Black Trial Collective is an organization of black and indigenous archeologists as well, the first thing they do is they talk to the local people for their own stories about that place.
Not just what we might think of as history, but also what we might think of as myths and legends. Because they're dismissed. 'cause they're just too fantastical to be histories. So they've gotta be, you know, made up. And the two things that I can remember from her book, which is an Indigenous History of the Western Palolo, something like that, which it was also kind of a shot at the whole idea of paleolithic, you know, so it's kind of a tongue in cheek title as well.
The people look up Paulette, Steve's, they'll find it. There's two stories that I recall. One is about the Thunderbirds. So many native cultures in the so-called Americas have this, these stories of Thunderbirds, these great thunderbirds. And she says, well, okay, but giant T tos, like giant black terra Acto, like birds that existed, they were huge.
Are they not thunderbirds? They would've made a tremendous racket as they were flying across the sky with their giant wings. You know, the call they made must have been terrifying. If we think about the what Ravens, you know, imagine a raven with a 20 foot wingspan. You know, these were massive birds that probably did pick up your toddler and fly away.
These are huge, huge birds. So that's one thing, Thunderbirds t tos. The other story she tells comes from the Osage about these mythic beasts that, you know, there's this big battle of these mythic beasts and you, it was so bad that you couldn't even cross the planes. They, there were just so many of them, and the Osage returned to this place regularly for ceremony because some, something had happened, they all died, and then they were able to cross the planes and it was like, yeah, yeah.
Missing and legends, whatever, except that. Then archeologists found evidence of like this massive death of like giant. The word just fell out of my brain elephant. Like things, the mammoths, the wooly mammoths. Yes. You know, these giant mammoths who all kind of died right around the same time for, and they don't quite know why, but it was exactly where the Osage had been doing their ceremonies and saying that this thing happened.
And so these stories are carried forward. You know, 10, 20,000, 30,000 years. Meaning we've been here for a very long time being in relation with this land for a very long time. It's not the same thing as newcomers coming here and then, you know, wreck the place like a Motley crew hotel room. You know, we've been here and our stories prove it.
You know, like, you know Tate Walker, they talk about Sami in, you know, white buffalo calf woman. I, I love this story that they tell about. Writing for Fierce, the anthology Fierce. And they said it was supposed to be about a woman that you admired that kind of helped you. And Matet wanted to write about swi.
And the editors were like, no, tis we isn't real. And Tay was like, well, of course she was, because we have the pikes. How do you think we got it? And so we have evidence, uh, of things and the story that we tell around them. May not meet certain criteria of what's real and not real. But we gotta also think about who's setting those criteria and to what end, because of course they're gonna set the criteria in a way that privileges them.
Like why are all the mystical spiritual things that happen in the Bible? True. But the mystical spiritual things that happen for the Ojibwe are not true. Like of course they're
[00:20:44] Risa: true. I just love Steves in the way that she writes about going to story as a way of sort of. Burning through so much of the clutter that fills the sciences to try to see what people have been knowing and, and holding onto for so long.
There's this quote from her. About pyro, epistemology. She writes, pyro epistemology is a term I coined, which metaphorically describes critical indigenous scholarship. A practice of pyro, epistemology through the ceremony of indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing is one which cleanses the academic landscape of discussions that mis inform world worldviews and fuel misunderstanding and racism.
Such literary renewal clears the way for new discussions and intellectual growth in academic fields of thought and centers of knowledge production. How do we do it? How do we do pyro? Epistemology, Patty? I
[00:21:47] Patty: don't know. I think well, and I think Bad Indian's book club is an attempt at it. Hannah Burgess, she had tweeted that thing out about doing her, uh, dissertation without citing any white men, and that intrigued me.
Like that was what caused me to reach out to her was, Hey, let's talk. But her mentions filled with people telling her that she would be excluding experts in the field, which was really funny because she hadn't said what her field was. And so clearly white men are the experts on everything. As a, we, we had a really good conversation with her and I, and that comes from, uh, Sarah aad, who has a practice of not citing white men, um, because citation is relationship.
How do we clear space in order? To start thinking about something new. Like when my friend, because this whole mess started when my friend Kyle asked for a book they could read to help them understand indigenous thought. And I was like, there isn't one. There's lots of them. Because I didn't want, I didn't want to just add one more book to their bookcase.
I wanted them to clear space. You gotta push it all aside and read a variety of things. And it's the same whether it's, it's a book club, whether it's, you know, the way you're going to enter a workplace committee, you know, we're not just going to rehabilitate what is already not working. We're gonna clear space.
We're gonna. Burn it down, which is, I mean, and that comes from the Ojibwe practice and a lot of practices, uh uh, it might be called slash and burn agriculture, but that's really destructive. It could also be understood as just, you know, clearing grasslands like my son who burned grasslands in our backyard.
Now it's like full of wild strawberries because when you burn away, you know, when you use controlled burns. You don't get the massive wildfires when the fire comes through. And the different trees that you plant, like quaking Aspen, are basically a fire break. So when you take care of the forest and you take care of it with diversity, and that includes burning, that includes the burning of grasslands, burning of underbrush, you get rid of the stuff it leads to massive out of control.
And we can see it in our world right now. We can see when you don't allow people space to live their lives, a layered relationship. When you create stateless people by insisting on ethnostate for everyone and looking at you Israel, you know when you do that and Trump's freaking idea of taking over Gaza, that's just, I can't even with that man, he is extremely dangerous.
I don't like making fun of him because him and his policies and. He's building a world that I will not be safe in, you know? But when we do that, when we don't allow for resistance to shape our world in ways that are healthy and constructive and wrestle with the things that need wrestling with, you're going to get explosions.
Getting explosions on the white supremacist end of it. I'm just reading a book right now about white, the white power movement, because they felt unheard and unseen, and that's emerging in violence. But you also see it on the left. You know, we forget how violent the seventies were at times, you know, with bombings and the weathermen and you know, the anti-war movement like King said.
What did he say? Rebellions riots or the language of the unheard. A pyro. Epistemology is not that violent wildfire that destroys everything, which is what people think it is, you know, or what you know how they might hear it. It's that controlled burn that gets rid of the things that need to be gotten rid of so that life can thrive.
It's not about burn it all down and destroy everything. It's about let's get rid of the things that no longer serve us if they ever did, so that we can so, so that we can all thrive. Now I'm back to we survive together or not at all.
[00:25:40] Risa: You've mentioned that you grew up evangelical. I wonder what your spiritual world looks like these days.
Do you draw strength from a metaphysical worldview that combines something that you still find redemptive in the church with something that you have found in your anishnabe stories?
[00:26:00] Patty: Yeah. You mentioned a vision with Dear woman, I have a distinct memory of sitting in church. This was during, I don't know, more when I understood that being Ojibwe also had a political aspect, right?
Because so much of our lives, you know, we're individually this or that, and then at some point we under, we come to understand that that identity, those relations also have a political component. Then we start taking action in that political sense. And for me, and for a lot of us, that was Idle No more, we started understanding our lives in a more political sense.
And I remember I have a very distinct memory of sitting in church and hearing or seeing or something. I don't know. I don't wanna say Jesus talk to me, but that's how I understood it at the time. I don't know if I would understand it that way now that I was going to have to choose. The, the, the, the path I was on was just gonna keep diverging and that I could no longer kind of try to be both things that I had to choose.
It was no choice. It was like, well, obviously I'm Ojibwe. Like there what? There is no choice. And I know there are a lot of Ojibwe people who are Christians that is not necessarily mutually exclusive. But in that moment it was presented to me as mutually exclusive that I was going to have to choose. And I was like, well, of course, obviously I'm Ojibwe and that was my choice.
And over time those paths have. Diverged. I still speak to the church because that's where I grew up. I get invitations to talk to the church. Becoming Ken was very much written for the church community to help them understand their stories differently. I no longer believe that the church is the only source of truth about this world or that the Christian tradition is the only source of truth in this world.
I find the Ojibwe Anishinabe cosmology just makes more sense to me. I, my mom's like, you know, you know, how about having, believing you know that the moon is alive, that the world around me is alive? And it's always, well, as long as you don't worship it, I'm like, what does that even mean? I'm like, do I worship my spouse?
Do I worship my kids? Like I can love something and understand it to be alive and have agency you, you know, like that's, to me, that's just like more weird. Evangelicalism. I would say now that I am very interested in spirit and, and for me, the Ojibwe worldview just makes the most sense in terms of understanding that we are surrounded by sentient spiritual beings and we are in good relation with those beings.
And I was wrestling this through, if you listen to medicine for the resistance. You'll kind of hear my whole trajectory as Carrie kind of brings me into the way of the woo, you know, kind of understanding our spiritual existence. And at one point in a conversation with Chand, I was talking about this and she says, that's just physics patty.
It's just quantum physics. Everything is connected. It doesn't have to be mystical. That's just physics. And that really made me laugh because everything really is connected. It's the stories we tell about those connections. And so, yeah, so I would say that for me, I'm anishnabe, I see value in those old stories.
I particularly like reading Jewish thinkers on them. I find they get us to a more liberatory, you know, expansive way of understanding those stories. I find evangelical Christianity very narrow and insular and unhelpful. It's taking us to very dangerous places. So I would say I have definitely put that in my rear view mirror.
That's not a faith system that I'm in any way. Connected to. I have friends who are Christians who are part of a more liberatory practice, which is really cool. My son was home for Christmas and we went to the Metropolitan Church in Toronto 'cause he wanted to go there. Uh, I'm gonna be speaking at a church, Dale United, I think it is.
That where Philip Cote actually has some, he's an Anish artist. Has some beautiful artwork there, so I'm gonna be speaking there in June because there is a possibility of liberation. There are ways to read those stories. And there are just so many Christians, you can't ignore them, right? You have to talk to them.
And because I grew up there, I know the language, but it's no longer a theology that I accept as my own. It's, I'm probably moving dangerously close to animism. My mom would probably think that that was dangerous. I see it as liberatory. The world is alive. It's alive in all kinds of ways. We don't understand, and the Old Testament teaches that.
So that's Mary Nor Guard's work on the Hebrew Bible and environmental ethics. So I made my choice and it was the right one.
[00:30:35] Risa: That's where I end up too, for sure. You know, I. We're having a conversation in our coven space about, you know, agnostic or atheist. Witchcraft. Like, what does that, how does that work?
You know, people have been asking about that and there's no sort of rules with witchcraft. Witchcraft is like a set of tools, you know, it's like, um, you don't have to believe the same things to believe that you can kind of dance between your own will and the will of the universe and try to find some space in there.
But I always land on this, like, there, there may be gods and, and it might be the lake. You know, I live on a lake and I, I tend, I tend to feel like if there, if there are gods, it's probably. All around us and right there. And so I really loved, I love Louise Ridge and I really loved stumbling upon this piece.
And I wonder you just above this piece, you, you write about the prophecy of the seventh and eighth fires, and I wonder if you could talk about that too. But I just wanna read this. You wrote, the land has more agency than we realize. All our stories contain mercy too. Solomon wrote that it rains on the jest and the unjust alike eagles fly overhead.
Searching out those who are living in a good way. We can still listen to the stones that will surely cry out. Do I really believe this? There was a time when I wondered, do I really believe all of this writes novelist Louise or Rich? I'm half German rational. Does this make any sense? After a while, such questions stopped, mattering, believing or not believing it was all the same.
I found myself compelled to behave toward the world as if it contained sentient spiritual beings. I don't know if the land is alive, not in the way that I know my dogs are alive, but it might be. And I've stopped bringing home rocks that don't belong to me.
[00:32:22] Patty: You know, I, uh, in, in q and as, after, and this isn't the question that you're asking, but in q and as, I inevitably get white women wanting me to absolve them, of them are Brittany.
There's always one, and I want, I mean, we're always gonna want you to absolve us of something and like, you know what? You just need to think about, you just need to think about that. You need to think about what it means for these rocks if they really are alive. Which is another reason why I had quay become stone and learn from stone because yes, as you just kind of accept, well, you know, maybe they are alive, maybe things are alike.
Maybe I am surrounded by saying maybe I'll just live as if they are. And you like the Ojibwe. We don't have like a creator, God who's kind of out there in the universe somewhere. Creator is more creative process, and again, we're back to verbs and nouns, right? Creator is process. It's the energy that C Chanda says is just physics.
It's just physics. It's just quantum physics, like it's not that special. Do we fully understand it? Oh, is part of that? Because we're refusing to use language that helps us understand it. Absolutely. It's the spirit that's kind of in and around and connecting everything. And we tap into it in all sorts of ways, you know, and, and I think for me, like my biggest break with Christianity came when I started collecting tarot decks because I was always like, Ooh, that's so dangerous and demonic.
And it's like, no, it's just a way of telling stories. Each tarot deck tells a different story about the world and how we relate to it, and it's a really big world. A lot of different ways of being in relation, and some of them are helpful and some of them are not helpful, and we can learn from each other and we can learn how to connect instead of one group kind of hoarding.
All of that connection. No, you can only be connected with the spiritual world if you're part of our little group. And then everything else is demonic and beyond redemption. That was something, a book I read recently pointed out was when something is demonic, we, it's been put beyond redemption and we do that to people.
Right? So when we demonize people, when putting them beyond redemption, you know, and so that's what the church does, right? It puts everything outside of it, beyond redemption, and how does that get us anywhere except exactly where we are politically. Everybody who's not part of your group is demonic, you know?
And beyond redemption, of course, that's how we land here. And it's fear. It's very fear-based, especially since that group kind of fractured into 8 million groups that all believe they're the only one who hold onto it. And so, yeah, so I love that quote from Louise because she's like, what if I just live differently?
Wait, would that be so bad? And it turns out that that gets us to someplace really good. I really like that. Please. And that's why, you know, the, the subtitle for Bad Indians Book Club, because we're reading at the edge of a thousand Worlds. I'm not suggesting that bad Indians will lead us to a new world, and that's like the seventh and eighth fires.
So the seventh fire is, um, a wildfire that destroys everything and. How we prepare determines the outcome, right? Like my son burned a fire in the backyard. Now we have all kinds of beautiful wild strawberries. You don't take care of things and you get Pacific Palisades burning down, right? You get like these massive out of control wire wildfires that are incredibly destructive, and that's all down to how you prepare.
The fires are coming. We know that. That's why our prophecies are built around fires. Not nice little campfires that you hang around and tell stories with. These are transformative fires that change the landscape. What the landscape looks like after that fire comes through. Entirely dependent on how we prepare for it now, but the fire is coming.
The eighth fire is if we have prepared, well, if those of us who are part of this community have kind of picked up our bundles and restored ourselves. If the newcomers basically changed their systems to stop being so disruptive. So we take care of our stuff. Y'all take care of your stuff, you know? And that's how we survive together, because then the fire gives us that beautiful field full of wild strawberries or blueberries or fireweed or any of those beautiful things that come back after a fire has come through.
And the eighth fire is a time of peace and brotherhood, which isn't a single world to which we must all be conformed. It's many worlds. It's the swamp Swamps are beautiful. They get a bad rap, but they're beautiful, you know? And now I'm kind of interested in Baba Yaha. I need to find some books about her.
'cause that's, you know, my mom's side of the family. And she also lived in a swamp, so maybe she got a bad rap too, because she's supposedly like the scary woman who, eight children. But I don't know, maybe she got a bad rap too. 'cause swaps always, you know, they're dark and scary and they can be, but they're also full of medicine and good things, and they're beautiful.
That's where plants grow and all kinds of wonderful things grow and we just wanna pave them over and put a Walmart there. And that's dumb. That's how you get floods. So what if we all just lived that way as if the world around us was alive, took that life seriously, made decisions based on that, talking to the original people of that place 'cause they know it better than we do and then just built a better world.
Would that really be so bad? I don't think that would be so
[00:37:50] Risa: bad. Oh, Patty, I can't believe it's been an hour and a half. I still have 73 more follow up questions. I'm just so excited to meet you. I love your writing and the way you think I. So much in your work, so much. I'm just really, really thankful that when your editor forwarded our request and was like, this is weird, do you wanna do this?
Which podcast? You were like, I do. I thought that was so funny. This is,
[00:38:21] Patty: wow. Like,
[00:38:21] Risa: what's weird about that? I know. I was so happy that you were like, no. Yeah, I do. That is, that is, yeah. This sounds, this sounds a lot of fun. That is of interest to me. I do wanna beat the witches. If people wanna find and get involved in all of your projects and wanna support you, can you tell them how to do that?
[00:38:41] Patty: Yeah, so the easiest way to find me would probably be on my poorly maintained website, danish.ca. DA nis.ca. Only because that's where the links are to everything else. So it's my blog, which is thousand worlds.ca, just because I was really invested in that title, and so I wanted to own it. And then also pay your rent.ca, which is the Ana Gana Foundation.
[00:39:05] Risa: You're amazing. Thank you so much for staying on with me for so long and for lighting us all up so much.
[00:39:11] Patty: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited about this one coming out and being able to, yeah, I'm a missing witch. I'm really excited too. Take care of you so that you can keep doing the good work that you're doing.
And telling stories and getting stories out. There is work. It is work, and it's important work because this is how worlds get changed.
[00:39:35] Risa: Feel really lucky to be part of the. Thousand possible worlds that we get. Imagine together.
Yes.
We say, um, Blessed Fucking Be.
Patty: Blessed Fucking Be.
[00:39:47] Amy: be a witch. A witch. You must be a.
