bringing people together based off of the stuff of that common wealth and china and building power to address those issues to address the players who are behind closed doors making decisions that are causing those younger brother sixteen who is a young black man in america is with us here this past weekend and we i was talking to him our great grandmother who was a sharecropper our great grandmother and just like really like how the reality is that like a lot of the things that she faced in the world the fights that she had to go through the conversations she had to have with the young black man and her family and the other young black people in her family there are so similar to  and so i think when people ask the question about like how does history connect to the work it's really like i am trying to channel her you know trying to channel that legacy trying to channel like the energy of my ancestors to actually change something so that you know a generation down the line we don't have to continue to have the same conversation about race and race in this country and that we're actually working towards a place where people have equity and the things that they need so i think that's really how it c work and then there's obviously a long legacy of like amazing black women and amazing career black women who have been organizers and who have been the backbone of pretty much every movement that there is and so i really am like out there fighting for them too because unfortunately because i think the combination of like racist narrative and sexist narrative there their stories are invisible and i made history and so i really like i think that the work too is really like having america actually see that black women have been rocked and they won and they will continue to do it and that like our leadership is necessary and has always been crucial and that now is really the time for us to recognize and that's why i threw it out of the block as a matter of because that's really what it's about it's about centering the leadership of those who are traditionally marginalized inside of our movement because that's where we know where our strength is because those are the folks who are directly impacted by the problems therefore like they're the ones who know the solution so i think that's kind of how history connected to the work that i do is like living out the legacies of a black leader is black women leaders and doing what we do is like building our communities bringing them together and fighting back whenever we need to fight back but also like imagining future for ourselves and imagining a different  six months after six weeks after he did that the church start condemning him they funded a program for us but they want to give them money because he said that the church violates all the commandments of god  refugee i came here with my family when i was six years old and my parents lived through the what we call the secret war in laos laos was supposed to be a neutral country during the vietnam war when the us left the country in one thousand seventy five my family i think my mom says you know they tried to stay as long as they could but when it got too dangerous and my father was still off fighting but  could and then eventually some villagers came by and there was an elderly gentleman he was all bringing in my mom is giving and in the most community if you have the same last name you're considered family and so he  he basically told her you have to lose because the come in the soldiers are coming and if they find you in the kids they will kill you so she left without my dad and he helped her carry a couple of us and she she had some silver bars and things so she paid another woman to carry you know two of us and we made our way and somehow miraculously near the border my father found us they were reunited before we entered titling yeah i think it's easier sometimes to organize with people who are more like you at the beginning that when you're talking about system change when you're talking about cultural transformation has to be intergenerational because a lot of the people who make up the rules or who are holders of particular values are a different th know and so yes and have the power and authority to to you know persuade things happening i mean it could take a really long time and so i have tried  in a lot of my work to make sure that there is intergenerational voice and that is our challenge in the community especially in the middle community where the majority of people are really under the age of twenty or the is really a conviction in a commitment to continuously reflecting on our own actions as well as our larger collective action about whether it's actually achieving justice right so not  what is it that suppresses their own capacity to resist and so it's a question of storytelling what are the stories what are the stories where do you put the actually contribute all the cultural ekuban to be able to counter the toxic narratives of people sort to keep them from allying with each other from teach others potential allies or understanding their own capacity or understanding what are the conditions that are holding down when i was and trauma it's about the loss of power so that being involved in organizing at the youngster i think within her the healing and as an editor a sense and i have what awareness because of my family it was the police killing a young black man that actually drew me into political activism in chicago at that time and you know fred hampton is a woman named he was the more the head of the local chapter of the black panther party to me he didn't seem like a youngster right he was one of the older guys those guys were in their twenty's but that's what made me into an activist and over the years i've been drawn into many different types of movements but this really like when people look at my artwork they say well how do you connect with so many different issue and what are the issues that are most important to me there's really only one issue and that is human resilience in the face of oppression that's my issue as they come to the stage and our moderator comes a really want you to be conscious of this idea of being vigilant now too often it is easy for us to sit on our laurels or to reflect back on what did or did not happen but our children and those who are who look at us as people of responsibility will ask what did you do what did you do and so i want to thank our panelists for sharing their stories about how they have been vigilant in all of their lives one thing i thought was very interesting was that mr bellecourt said i have never vary from my position and i think each and every one of us should ask ourselves have we varied from our own positions in terms of our responsibilities and with that in the panel over to dr pounds thank you can you guys hear me let's give our illustrious panel around so just to reiterate we have clyde bellecourt who is the executive director american indian movement interpretive center next acquired we have bow who's the director of the coalition of asian american leaders and she is a newly appointed commissioner to president obama's commission on asian americans and pacific island next of all we have candace montgomery who i've had the chance to work with quite a bit through black lives matter she's an organizer for take action minnesota next to candace is ricardo leavens morale is who is an artist activist hiller organizer and my personal favorite troublemaker if any of you just happened to me and if any of you have paid attention to our boycott mall of america graphic it was really powerful as a young african american person and we use that particular graphic demonstrating model for america talking about issues of capitalism how it's ok to spend our money at the mall but we don't always get justice while ricardo was the person who designed that particular graphic and it's indicative of a lot of his work of capturing the essence of movements as they're unfolding so what i want our panel to do is to talk about what vigilance looks like today and you can each take some time and unpack that  want to speak from a stork a perspective you're able to do so thinking about the work that you're doing and the issues that you're seeing today and i want to ask a couple of additional questions and then we're going to open it up to the audience to ask questions of this panel pipes and you know we have we've been around now for thousands and thousands of years well over five hundred years ago there was some ships when there's a historian's canniness today would not end in historian d s to meet anywhere from sixteen million to thirty six million indigenous people live here on this continent over fifteen hundred tribes total that's book depend dialogues but had to same sacred way of life there wasn't a day when they got up that it in build a fire to operate a tobacco to the four colors the universe they knew there was for riches a human bein's in this world and those colors became sacred to them and he operated tobacco not only that asking the creator issue and today yet today it's strictly a black and white issue and that's where the movement was point and i made a statement that white european education the church organized religion and when he asked me what are you going to do to make things change what are you going to do are you going to change things it's somewhere in the creator must a give me this word i said would do it to confrontation politics after you go to the police chief you go to a school board because we're not teaching anything about indian people in the curriculum that i think dropout rate in nature and ninety's some percent of our children entering the ninth grade are not graduate into day you demand change and we became the number one threat check it out investigate find out because i made that statement we became the number one threat to the stability and it's a curate of the united states government without congressional or presidential approval who do you think you are you can go in and tap phones of all not only dead indian people but all the churches and all the people that supported us that  for nine and a half months for nine and a half months to remember that it's not the indian people that are guilty it's the united states federal government every treat every every made with indian people threw out all the charges facing over three hundred years in prison plus two life sentences i was wondering you know what am i going to do which one of my going to do first and that's  chairman it's not that the puppets and government traditional people who signed a treaty that are still here said we want you to go to united nations seek government relations and government even down into the congo in what thirty years it took us when we put together the declaration of rights of indigenous people of the year and the only ones it didn't sign was united states government canada australia and new keep vigilance today we represent over three hundred stick get fired or you indigenous people of the world and it started with just a few women and children came together in the right  speak to be able to find that history and that that's what it takes in order for us to build powerful people who can create the kind of country and environments  everyone thrives and i think we have a long ways to go so i think for the asian american community we have a very long history in america but it's something that we don't  about and that at different parts or different times in history there have been different ethnic groups within the asian american population that have been impacted and we have anything going back from you know the early days of building the railroads where chinese american chinese workers were brought because of cheap labor but they built the railroads of  this country but were not recognized and in fact that scared so many white people that they passed the chinese exclusion act in the eighty's and eight think there's a sense that asian americans are perpetual foreigners we have third fourth generation asian americans who are seen as foreigners still in this country and it's a sense that many still feel and so for us it's really about how do you have all these complex histories how do you speak truth about all of those experiences but still come together to build solidarity and to talk about what it means to be asian americans in this country and that our history matters but we are just as americans as we are whatever other ethnic communities that we might come from and then i think what we see today in terms of the black life's movement and what really other communities are teaching us is really about what it takes to really achieve justice and what solidarity means because our history in this country what's lavery taught us is that white supremacy is about lifting up the differences right magnifying all those differences and  the center of the conversation so that we can build solidarity so i think for us to vigilance is about creating space for truth creating space for people to demand what they need in order to have the kind of environment that where they can thrive but also understanding that we live in the context of a country that wants us to be divided right so that we can't speak truth to power and making sure that we can speak our truth but also building solidarity with different communities of color because our liberations are tied to each other and asian americans know this really well because through the civil rights movement in the one nine hundred sixty s was when the term the model minority myth was created right that was a term that was by i guess now we would consider it one of our most progressive pit person in the country in the new york times to talk about how a community was able is able to achieve and how  no other community that is suffering should see that as an example and that kind of division does no good and today we find that kind of framing of our community still detrimental to addressing the disparities or challenges that exist in our communities because we choose to only see communities as an aggregate number it's easier for people to say asian  americans what does that really mean in the asian american community here in minnesota we know we represent over forty ethnic groups that come from fifty different countries who have you know been here from some are fifth generation americans to those who vigilance is about us not accepting what is as said this morning status quo how do we not make it easy for ourselves and just say well we can't talk about your community because i read this and so that's good enough it's not good enough for the people who are suffering there truth matters and ultimately for us how do we keep not just talking about this but acting together and showing up that white supremacy relies on us not showing up together so to me that candace wolf first of all i just want to say how humbled i am to be on this panel with all of these amazing leaders and elders yeah they're like expanding my in my mind too and i'm a millennial so i'm not on my cell phone i'm phone so i think you know i just just really adding on to the conversation and would really just did oh everything that's been said so far when i was approached about this panel and when i was thinking about you person as a young organizer really learning how to do this work and also teaming up with a set of folks a set of other young people who are really imagining new ways to do the work that's really what really stood out for me in like the sort of like vigilance that i'm living right now and i think that especially through the history that i'm obviously i'm very connected with we see young people continuing to really challenge even the folks who are with us and that's like a sort of a theme of vigilance that i really resonate with  especially as a young black woman i am not always entirely completely aligned with other black folks and community or other movement people and there is something to be said  about when young people especially the young people i think who are mostly connected with through black lives matter really started to build a movement in a new way and a movement that really if affirms in asserts that we're talking about all black people when we say black lives matter and not just some black folks but all of us and all the shapes forms identities that we come in all the cultural backgrounds and across the globe  that women will be at the center in trans folks will be at the center and knowing that that's going to create a lot of tension within your own community and being willing to do it anyways because you know the risk of not doing it what happens when we leave people out of our movements when we just focus on some black lives we continue to create these false narratives around separation that capitalism is so dependent on when we don't talk about black trans women for example we are leaving out an entire conversation about how these systems of oppression intersect to really f us over excuse my language i'm from the east coast so i like have to edit myself a lot at least this because saying we we leave out an entire part of the conversation you know like black trans women disproportionately end up in prison and when they end up in prison they don't end up in a prison with other folks who share a similar gender identity with them there also it's incredibly difficult for black trans women to to  be gainfully employed and there's a narrative there about who who qualifies for quality job and who's worth it and who actually deserves dignity in the workplace and in the world  we see models of like c c mcdonald's who can even just go outside at night safely and then are incarcerated for multiple years for protecting herself for protecting herself and so that's really what i want i think about vigilance with and not trying to repeat anything people said adding to this conversation that's that is like what is it also look like for a human inside of our movements to be pushing the folks who are pushing further the folks who are challenging us to go a little bit further a little bit farther than what we had already imagined that's the kind of vigilance that i really try to carry in my work and look and try to find support from the folks came before me but i also know that they didn't get it perfect obviously obviously they didn't get it perfect and so there's still room to grow and a lot of folks will want you to not feel that way and so i think vigilance for me also is about leaning into fear and leaning into the unknown i am an organizer in i do a lot of my work really grounded in grassroots leadership finding folks and building with people in the community who are organizers who don't come to conferences on a regular basis who don't have access to things like this because they're single working mom because they're dealing with barriers around a criminal record because they're trying to find housing a job bubble bubble and my job really is about bringing them in having conversations with them and one of the sort of challenges that i've been finding in my work especially as i dive deeper into black lives matter is working with leaders to really imagine what comes next what do we want you know a lot of times folks talk about black lives matter and they associate it with police reform i would say the police reform is maybe the liked b that we see on our path but i believe that we can live in communities without police but how do we get more people thinking about that and saying like you know what do we want corporate reform or do we want an but and how do we how do we talk about the work right now in a way that is is shooting for it for the future and really challenge ourselves and challenge people amongst us to really aim for a little bit further than when we had originally imagined i think about things like you know the fifteen dollar hour wage campaign like absolutely but like is it because we want people to have fifteen dollars an hour and like be able to meet their basic means or is there a vision that we have around work around the way our society operates within itself that says that people are taken care of people are living in dignity people are able to contribute with their their skills their talents their passions and live sustainably so that's really what i think about with vigilance is continuing pushing on and being brave enough to really think think about think outside of the box we've been given and imagine imagine ourselves beyond beyond beyond ourselves  hello everybody lovely to be with you and with you who are the other room watching on the screen yes we know you're there i was just thinking of some things that i hadn't planned to bring up but in listening to my fellow panelists i found myself thinking about how the young people of today are the elders of tomorrow the elders of today with the young people of yesterday and the ancestors to whom we look were the descendants of the past and i was realizing that in the thinking i did the notes that i had jotted down for this that this really three voices that i think are particularly present in the way i think about vigilance because prisons is about perception and the three end sisters are in some ways my mentors although i never met any of them the first is i mean the west african revolutionary who fought against the portuguese and taught me that culture and identity are at the center of liberation ella baker who lived out the creed that seeds of power exist within everybody and need to be nurtured and not forced and who taught me the you leverage with which to shift history so anyway i was the whole question of vigilance can be answered on so many different levels and i decided to choose the biggest one so i wish to address you as a member of a particularly clever species of monkey ok humans are primates primates are mammals mammals are organisms and the primary activity of every organism is to process a tremendous amount of nuanced and detailed information from our environment in order to survive and to be able to distinguish threat from our paternity nutrient from toxin falsity from truth and understand that these are distinctions we're making in order to act they're not distinctions that exist in nature there are distinctions that we create because it's where you can truly separate false food from truth nutrient from toxin and threat from opportunity but we need to decide that so one of the problems is that we live in a lie saturated system so that it's one thing to be a sheep and having to watch out for wolves it's another thing when the wolves come dressed up as sheep there are pathogens that enter our body by disguising themselves as nutrients and we open the doors of them and we have been trained and confused in the pews to the point that we often cannot tell nutrients from toxins and we open the door to the wrong ones and we miss the opportunities to welcome in nutrients because we think they're talking so some of the solutions with which were prevented are in fact toxins or you go so what i want to put before you is that there's really nothing that complicated about race and what's complicated are the smokes the mirrors the structures the pathways the fal which is used to keep it keep it from seeing that it's really very simple and to continue tricking us into between each other we all come from human lineages that have acted historically in solidarity with each other have also betrayed each other that's what we've got to work with so you think listening to the media listening to academics listening to pundits that this whole racism thing is really so complicated we just can't figure it out that's why we can resolve it and it really is so simple that it fits into a single word theft ok genocide on this and other continen with a mechanism to enable fast on a massive scale slavery with theft on a massive scale colonialism and neocolonialism are theft on a massive scale to me more precise these are all forms and expressions of armed robbery the relationship to land and nature which is imposed within an empire is one of theft on a massive scale you take and take and  nothing back and you don't even share with your own kind of stuff that you've plundered and us resistance and resilience have forced changes to this architecture over years at least to the decorations but like pathogens when you when you bombard your bacteria with antibodies they evolve and the essential nature of the plunder continues to evolve because that's basically were  simple you know stop a theft you know it's an architecture it's not a personal failing now we have thought it as a toxin so we become part of it and it becomes personal but fundamentally the invisible piece is the architecture why is it invisible because every abusive family requires a cover story in order to hide the truth and your faith placed within that family on your relationship to that cover story and it's especially explosive when the abuse is continued when is continuing when there's a gap in any society between the story and the cover stor that's hard to deal with ok as an organism we want all of our senses to be aligned we want our choices our story about ourselves what our environment tells us what our body tells us to all be in line that's called integrity it feels like shit to live without it and the bigger the gap in a society between the cover story and the story the more emotional and psychological and spiritual strain people are under and in order to keep those things together to both feel you know feel the truth that steer you in the face and speak to your body every day but live in alignment with the cover story to be able to reconcile that requires evil hell of a lot of self medication or it expresses a severe mental illness and those are the primary conditions of the people we walk among every day but look what we have going for us is it people are hungry for truth are hungry for integrity but they don't know how to find it and they don't really know how to recognize it because we're simply not really used to it so so we live in a moment where we live in an abusive family the injuries of abuse all around us everybody wants to heal the injuries of abuse and the abuser is giving us funding in order to address goes into it so what does that tell us about the kinds of questions we ask in the intake interview so how does that sit the situation come about i want to go back to history because what we're talking about historical truth is not just me complaining these are historical truth and what we're dealing with is that there are three forms of organisation which we have inherited through which civic society gets to try to address our aspirations each one was put in place at the end of a great wave of popular struggle in order to keep that struggle from threatening the fundamental abuse of truth though three institutions are tribal governments unions and non profits each was instituted to try to bring an end to a historical period of struggle and each of them substituted horizontal relationships with vertical ones so that the real primary relationship for tribal governments is vertical to the federal government unions to management not profits to funders which means that we live in a village and were prohibited from acting like it and all in my my comment my initial comment by saying that i grew up in a very rule perhaps the most isolated community in port in the mountains of puerto rico and there the resources came from the soil not from outside so that when somebody got ill in the community a child would go from door to door and you know this is a village stop it wasn't a village that's all exaggeration right houses scattered over the mountainsides a child would go around from house to house taking up  collecting money to help pay the medical bills right that is a method that is not permissible in the ecosystem of social change suppose we say ok we all got to come together and stop the enriched pipeline can you imagine the non profits that deal with child obesity or elder care or you know you know environmental issues or racism or whatever it is can you imagine say oh well we're going to pool our budgets we're going to send all our staff and all our volunteers down and we're going to block that pipeline or we're going to surround the police station and demand changes in the accountability and the punishment for police and those who help them cover up it can't happen because each of the non profits would be violating nonprofit law they'd be violating their bylaws they would be violating the terms of their grant so that the truth of struggle come from the spaces outside of the institutions their allies within it's all one ecosystem the question isn't are you insane working inside the system or are you working outside the system the question is are you working inside the delusion or outside the delusion right so that the struggle for fifteen dollars a struggle for black lives matter the struggle around occupy the struggle for native sovereignty the struggles for anti colonialism all of those emerged in the spaces outside of the structure you know and just like in south africa the nonprofits and all those and then the bar associations and the teacher's associations eventually teach themselves from the regime and migrated to the united  african national congress had established but none of them could initiate those changes it required creating a gravitational force outside of the margins were changed where they come from for these kinds of large shifts to begin to  change the natural environment in the balance of thank you you all have given us a lot of food for thought i'm just blown away so what i want to do now is i'm going to throw out two questions and you can choose which one you want to answer take about a minute or so and they were going areas are right for change in our society second question what does it mean to be radical in our society people of medical science are they have come up with a medicine yet that in people didn't have years in practice so when our children go to school or there's nothing for them to feel good about and that goes back to the mascot issue it's not let's see all that change the educational system used to thank you the only thing that's missing really is the political will to change it it should be a no brainer and that for so many of our communities the ability to really show up as yourself is nonexistent and so the fact that people can exist as they are  really important and so when we talk about you know in our community that women can rise up and say they are leaders that you know there's so much hesitation about who is a leader in our community and even the fact that is about all of us not pushing each other's histories on other people and being able to see people for who they are but also being able to  imagine the future that includes all of us and actually not just talking about it so i really love this morning's keynotes and about you know what is the action that is required for all of us to to be able to build the kind of future that we're talking about and how do we all show up and that and not just have the burden be placed on the people who are impacted to make that change  to the stories of workers in colombia primarily the organization i went with witness for peace they are connected to a lot of afro africa let me ns and so which for me in the person i went with who was also a black as matter was a really big deal for us to be able to just connect with black folks literally across the country who share a similar history but also experience injustice and violence and in a lot of different ways than we see here in the united states colombia is like one of the most dangerous places to be a labor organizer literally like just murdered if they find out that you are organizing and that you have any kind of power and i think from that experience and then you know a lot of experiences doing the mall of america as well i can now say without saying like response from from people across the cross the country i mean across the state and even like folks who are kind of with us of like well like but it's chris this and being like wow like we are so caught up in this like corporate law a this like capitalist lie that we've been given and going to colombia was this experience for me of of hearing these stories from workers who are just totally being fucked over by a multi national corporations in collusion with their government similar to the united states of america  and seeing the difference you know the level of violence is set up in a totally different way but also seeing the similarity is a one one sort of common thing that was happening  that these multinational corporations are basically birthing baby corporations and calling them by name and putting in different c e o at the top of the list but they're the same corporation but then when you create that corporation you can then subcontract out workers to work for that corporation and most likely that new baby corporation doesn't have any sort of union agreement with the workers has a lot less ties and just like basically no accountability same same thing happens here right so the person that i also one with he or regularly organizes retail janitors who are contracted to clean stores like macy's and target and things like that and the stories are the same the stories of not having work safe working conditions being worked hours and hours on end without a break having your wages stolen having your opportunities to form a union completely swept swept under you and like experiencing violence at the face of that and then the faces are the same one of the things that the spoke to us about was how you can see where these multi if you map over the like the population where the population density of actual colombians is in where the population density  of where basically multinationals have come in and taken over land and just really wrecked havoc on working conditions they completely overlap and it's the same thing in the united states so i guess the issue i'm really talking about is like we've we have got to get a handle on these corporations and this economic system that has spread across the world it's not just the united states but the reality is that it starts here and folks over in colombia are really clear that unless we change policies here unless we like put elise dismantle whatever it is on these corporations nothing's going to happen globally but i think the thing that is disconnected is this global fight around economic justice you know we're fighting for fifteen but there are folks in colombia who are literally making two dollars an hour cutting the flowers that we're all going to give our lovers on valentine's day after working twenty three hours so that's a big thing for me is really grappling with this and pointing out the systemic racism that they've used to build their profits yeah thank you i'm giving myself my one minute warning and well looking at my notes i can tell that i am illegibly an organizer globalized as a struggle five hundred years ago is the clash between cleverness and wisdom in organizing terms cleverness is about messaging and wisdom is about truth telling ok and truth telling or to put it differently messaging is about how you figure out where people at you can get them to do something truthtelling is figuring out what people hunger for so you can set them on fire and that's where radical go it's not always the most pragmatic because it's harder work to go to that deeper level you don't get instant by and once you've decided to be committed to truth telling and to wisdom you still need cleverness to figure out how to deliver it because people are used to it they think that it's a poison right and when it comes to truth telling it's really about telling truth to people already know in the mojave desert there are places where there are fifteen thousand dormant seeds for every square foot of soil of desert dried desert soil fifteen thousand seat and as organizers we tend to set up our little stool there are a bell in our loudspeaker and harang those seeds and tell them to grow why don't you grow where i think i have every motivation and everything they need to grow they just need to be water right let's feel a bacon message so and radical is understanding that that power is there does not need to be imposed it doesn't need to be can jolt the pathways need to be opened that's all  and people are ready to move on them and we were talking about truth that matter i would say that if you can come compile create form a political program th grader can explain then you can change the world the first mike on my program is nobody gets second still everyone has had first that is probably revolutionary it's incompatible with capitalism and everybody would say yeah i learned that when i was a kid so what we know as children what we learn from the cradle is actually a political to the world as a whole that's to me that's what radical it's make these distinctions and my final point before you decide i'm going over arbitrarily is that in making distinctions too we have to distinguish and a lot of times we think that things don't change because there's a lack of political will when really it's an overabundance of political won't watering us let us water i think the biggest area for change is in white people and we are so freaking terrified that we don't know what the health and we don't admit it and we