Fawn Pochel: Theory Without Practice Is Bullshit

Last week I sat down with my friend Fawn Pochel, First Nations Oji-Cree, auntie, educator, community organizer, co-founder of Chi-Nations Youth Council, and Education Coordinator of the American Indian Center. We discussed efforts towards collective action, mutual aid, community trauma, and the need for storytelling. Here’s a portion of our conversation: 

“Chi Nations Youth Council attends an annual Indigenous Conference that was canceled this year, so they took all their conference money and they started buying people groceries and delivering them; because there’s a need now and theory without practice is bullshit. They didn’t wait for a grant, they didn’t need 12 people to approve it, and they didn’t take poverty porn pictures while distributing it.

I’ve been really enjoying the fact that even though we’re in a pandemic, I’ve had the opportunity to reflect a lot when tending the garden outside of the American Indian Center and the First Nations Garden. Each time I’ve been working at both locations I’ve either had family support or community support. Though we are in this moment of social distancing there’s been more communal thought, how are we not only looking at the health of the land, but how are we asking consent in order to grow and look at the health of our own people. 

It’s coming on the strawberry season and as an Anishinaabek woman our strawberries are one of our primary medicines and we’re supposed to be in thought about that the whole strawberry season because it’s one of the shortest seasons we have. We’re delivering berries first and foremost during this time to remind our folks that our medicines are still growing, we still have access to these things. That’s a privilege that other folks don’t have, they don’t have access to their traditional medicines because they’re occupying our ancestral territories, and thinking about the ways that all of that came to be.

Doing mutual aid work has triggered me and my older sister in ways we didn’t think we were traumatized from. We’ve delivered food to families who were hungrier than others, it brought up memories of when we were children and we were hungry. We’re delivering food to folks who are living in different styles of housing and it made us remember that we used to own a house and we were gentrified out of Avondale and we were homeless and living in motels. Having that time to talk with our kids about “oh, we didn’t realize we were still hurt in all these different ways.” It’s made us conscious of how interdependent we are as a family. My two oldest sisters live in Green Bay and we’re living with their two oldest children, so the social distancing means that we can’t just jump in the car and visit them. We have to stand on the sidewalk and give air hugs to our other nieces and nephews. Understanding why different folks are taking social distance orders differently has helped us communicate some of our family traumas differently. So for the kids, it’s not like “our aunties are crazy.”

My father had tuberculosis and now he has his leg amputated and he’s having to go into hospitals by himself and he doesn’t communicate well with doctors. Everything wrong with him has happened just a few years ago, but he’s had diabetes since the 1990s. Just realizing that we’re products of a designed system that’s been designed to destroy our family structures and our thought processes. It’s been very depressing but also very enlightening.

We’ve been having conversations about our storytelling and our narrative processes how they have and haven’t changed through time. What does it look like to utilize formats that we’ve been given to uplift our voices? How are we working with folks to ensure that when Native people are going through different triggering aspects especially since COVID is being compared to smallpox and the Spanish Flu. Knowing how those have impacted our community compensation, cultural wealth, and how those pandemics have come to create this ideology of Pan-Indigenism and Pan-Indianism across the nation which is a way to homogenize Native people and further the cultural genocide of tribal knowledge systems.” - Fawn Pochel