Authoritarianism is accelerating as is climate change and environmental degradation. Fire season has started early in the South-West United States. We sit back and watch as the Earth is pillaged for its resources, wars are fought over them, there is a new mass shooting almost every day, often targeting Black and brown people. Children are not safe in their schools, parents are under an ever increasing amount of economic stress to raise them. Reproductive rights of women and people with uteruses are being attacked along with laws targeting LGBTQIA+ people. Mass shootings are being perpetrated almost daily by men who are overwhelmingly white, and while the question is important, we argue over guns while ignoring how deeply unwell the dominant white supremacist culture of the United States is. Little boys are taught they are not allowed to feel or show emotion. Children are forced to grow up in a world where their basic needs aren’t met, and those who advocate for basic needs to be met and rights to be respected are met with fierce opposition from those who see the world we live in, that they had to suffer through, as the way it must be. Those who have destroyed their own humanity to get by in a world that is incredibly inhumane and does not show respect for life, but capital.
To end all the different forms of violence that people are experiencing, we need to transform our material reality to one where everyone’s basic needs of food, water, shelter, a safe environment, and care are met. Our society should be centered around meeting these basic needs and guaranteeing our rights to them , not raising children to grow up to be productive workers so they can tirelessly grind themselves into the machine that is capital. Those who are not “successful” at molding themselves to fit this machine are locked away in cages, are barely getting by, or end up dying. People who have disabilities or can’t work for other reasons are cast aside to subsist on scraps. How can children not grow up to believe that this is the way that the world must be when it is all they have ever seen? Respect for life in all forms needs to be instilled in everyone, and that will happen when our material reality reflects the value that all life holds. While we push to transform material conditions, we should also cultivate and demonstrate a deep respect for all life, and work to do right by the Earth and each other.
These mass shootings are a product of the culture that we live in. We all play our part in enabling or enacting violence by reinforcing the narratives of settler-colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy, and cisheteropatriarchy.
Lenee Reid is a talented local activist and poet, who has a skill for speaking to the cultural changes that need to shift and what is needed in the moment. Here is a segment of her poem,
Eulogy for America
Whomever and whatever you have is precious
People, time, places, events, home, opportunities, potential
Do what you can
You can always do something
It is almost always beautiful outside
There is always hope
We must mourn together
Yet apart for awhile
Do not ignore or deny it
For that will make you sicker
Accept the loss
Wear a mask
We will persevere to a new day
we will heal and grow eventually
As a country
As families individuals communities
Just not today
Or this year maybe not even the next
But today we can be
A nation joined in mourning
Honor this time of loss
And grow as a people
Experiencing the same thing
We must always be grateful
For what we have
And look ever towards
Towards building a future
For the healing and the
Processing all this grief
To the hope of a better nation
Lennée and I had the chance to sit down and talk about her life, activism, poetry and our current moment. Her poetry is available for listening on tiktok @thequeenmystic and purchase at https://lenneereid.bandcamp.com
And her books at https://thegirlgod.com
Lenée: My name is Lennée Reid. My pronouns are she/her or they/them. I am a Creole neurodivergent single mother of color and survivor that is disabled. I’m an artist, author, healer, poet, model, musician and activist.
CPJ: We’d love to hear more about your activism.
Lenée: I just want to show my kid the right way, get involved and make a difference in all the things that I think matter. So I started marching against Monsanto with my mom and my kid years ago. I’ve done multiple walks with Protectors of the Salish Sea, MMIW marches, open and closed Women’s Marches, immigration marches, paganism, Witches March and Black Lives Matter of course, just wherever it seemed that there was injustice that needed support. The poem that I do that started me as a poet speaking with activism, One, is about oneness and people understanding each other. I have many feminist, environmental, and spiritual poems, so I concentrated on all of that in activism.
CPJ: All those things and the intersections between them are very important given our current moment.
Lenée: People are so broken. It’s hard, sometimes I want to give up on stuff. Then just the other day I was at Tugboat Annie’s, this kid from the kitchen came out and said, Excuse me, are you Lennée the poet. I said yes. He said he heard my poem, One, at Rooted in Community years ago, something they did when he was a kid, and he’s like, it really affected my life. That One poem hits people because everything is this and that, everything is on, both sides of it, one. The oppressors, they’re broken, still one. We live together. Do you know what I mean? We don’t have to be friends and agree with them. But we have to figure out how to meet in the middle and make progress and evolve as humans and society, so if I can impact people in my multicultural, mixed, Creole way of saying, Y’all just got to get along and talk to each other to understand each other, then I want to help. Because I do want to give up sometimes. Then some kids heard me, 5, 6, 7 years ago, that’s in their 20s now, sees me at a bar and says it affected them. It encourages me.
CPJ: In your poetry you speak a lot to things that need to change within our society, would you speak to that more?
Lenée: We need to decolonize- meaning decolonize our minds, our diets, and our yards. So whichever one is easiest for you. I see a lot of Western Caucasian people don’t look at their ancestral background as pagan. My mom’s like, your background isn’t this pagan stuff, we’re Christian. I’m like your 50% Gaelic, the whole British Isles were invaded by Rome. Christianity is not your ancestral religion. Then England and America went and did the same to Native people.
Decolonize your yard. Dandelions are one of the best medicines. It treats spike proteins in viruses like coccid. You can eat the whole plant. People used to pull up lawns to plant dandelions and we now put carcinogens onto our medicine. People have lawns that don’t have any food in it, and then go buy something simple, like garlic. Garlic in my yard grows like grass. Even one little thing, having a relationship with a plant, witnessing growth, all of that energy, lifeforce that’s one way that we can reconnect to the earth. It used to be the only religion, even if it’s not your religion, now you can connect in some way. We must decolonize in some way. It’s not just African American and Indigenous people, everyone needs to find their roots and be connected to the earth again. It’s destroying our health, everything being imbalanced. It’s not left or right or colonized or decolonized, it’s imbalanced. We need to come into balance with nature, health and life, now.
Lenée: People have an idea of anarchy, that it’s just like, burn it down. That’s not all of anarchy. It’s freedom to say I’m choosing to follow them because they seem to be good at this, so we’re gonna go do that. People who are good at it will do it and be followed by choice.
CPJ: It’s the choice that people have that matters.
Lenée: Yes.
CPJ: When you said decolonize I want to ask, what do you mean by that? I noticed the word relationship came up a lot.
Lenée: Your relationship to place your relationship to people. So, if you go to any country from any country and you go there, you show respect to them and you’re not colonizing them. No matter what religion you are, you just respect them and their culture. You’re a guest. We’re here on the Medicine Creek treaty lands that were signed under duress, in 1854 by some of the Coast Salish people like the Squaxin and Nisqually people. We live here, and so what, you’re not going to acknowledge them or learn anything at all? Really? Because we go to Norway and are ready to eat what they eat because you’re supposed to be in the place in relation to where it is, not change it. I talk to my daughter, but it’s like, you go to Muslim country it’s pretty restrictive culturally. If you’re not Muslim, they’re not gonna let you then try to proselytize them, because that’s their country, and that’s rude. Here, we’re supposed to have freedom of religion because the Puritans came here because they were being cast out. But we outlawed Native practices. Colonizing and bringing all that here and claiming freedom of religion, but then we tried to destroy Native religion. We were just allowed to have that again openly in the late 70s. So allowing people to have their culture too you know, it’s not just religion, it’s culture. There’s so much more to it and when you’re not trying to destroy other people. So yeah the relationship with decolonizing is to your place to where you are, every place has an Indigenous people, Indigenous land and ceremonies and songs that are from that place. You have your own ancestors. We are all relations. We should just learn about it all because it’s beautiful.
CPJ: How might one take this approach to joining social movements?
Lenée: One thing is when you have cultural differences and you have white people going into spaces that are led by people of color, because they want to help and it’s not helpful to then interject different cultural norms.
Lenée: I think people just showing up and being their most authentic self is the most important thing. People try to be someone they’re not or just, I don’t know, do things that they weren’t necessarily asked to do. Putting together Olympia, Witches March, I ask people of as diverse backgrounds as possible to come speak, so I feel like It’s a truly inclusive space. You don’t have those unless the purpose is for it to be an overall inclusive space. The dynamic of tokenization can be harmful. The thing that’s been my experience in Olympia is people who do nothing. People who won’t rent to you people, who won’t let you book their space, people who just very nicely and sweetly are the sweetest bigots you’d ever imagine, that you could never say nothing bad about, but that’s what that’s what discrimination is. It’s just saying no, just not including someone just not paying or hiring them not respecting them. It’s very easy to be calmly cruel and it’s common here.
Lenée: I’ve had people like at the Olympia High School walkout that I spoke at, a woman came up to me. She was real nice and was glad that I spoke, but she’s like I was just taught to play well with others and all these other things. To me I’m just like others can kiss my ass. That’s what others can do. It’s like, at my age and what I’ve been through I am to the point… people of color, women of color get discriminated against because of our boisterousness or different things, because we are really upset about injustice. It’s not real relationship, understanding, community, communication if you’re not understanding why someone is hurt or where they are coming from and then that’s bigotry. Yeah, that’s the bigotry you don’t experience it you don’t understand it and then you think someone is being over the top when they’re upset. It makes it hard to make a difference.
CPJ: Where do you find pleasure and joy?
Lenée: I love my dog. Being a mom and taking my kid places, gardening and cooking. I love cooking all different kinds of fusion stuff. I like making art, mostly just writing. If I got something, I write it out. I’ve been painting more and I like crafting and making my smudge sticks. I just putter around, just trying to make something that I feel like is productive and good and going forward.
Yes, I’m big on visualizing the world how you’d like it to be and being the change you want to see. I just rotate through all the different healing things to try to do self care and create balance. I’ve been through a lot of trauma when I was younger, and I’ve written about that too, with my slam, when I was doing that, so it’s just processing and healing and continuing.
Yeah, because of the car accidents, and all different kinds of things. So I’m just always trying to improve because I feel myself getting old. I feel like I’m still trying to recover over things from a long time ago. So building good relationships, trying to be involved and find community and just all the things that make me keep going and want to be a part of stuff. But yeah, food and medicine, herbs, gardening.
