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Episode 2

In this episode, Dr. Roberta Timothy discusses the historical origins of intersectionality rooted in Black activism and feminism, and how intersectionality can be used to make sense of diverse experiences and multiple systems of oppression faced by children and youth. As central to intersectionality, Dr. Timothy offers four concepts: identity, oppression, violence, and resistance. These concepts come to life in creative examples and personal learnings that Dr. Timothy shares in supporting children and youth exposed to violence. Lastly, Dr. Timothy offers a vision for the future where intersectionality is used for empowerment, wellness, healing, and action.

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Guest

Dr. Roberta Timothy is an Assistant Professor, Black Health Lead, and is the inaugural Program Director and creator of the MPH Program in the field of Black Health at Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. Dr. Timothy is also an Adjunct Professor in Critical Disability studies at York University.  She specializes in the areas of Black health; intersectionality, Black children and families, violence, transgenerational trauma, African/Black feminisms, ethics in health work; health and racism; art-based methodologies; transnational Indigenous health; and anti-oppression/anti-colonial approaches to mental health.  Dr. Timothy has worked for over 30 years in community health working on resisting anti-Black racism and intersectional violence strategies. Dr. Timothy is also co-founder and consultant at Continuing Healing Consultants where she implements and teaches her intersectional mental health model "Anti-Oppression Psychotherapy". She is an interdisciplinary scholar, health practitioner, and political scientist, who examines global health and ethics from a critical trauma-informed decolonizing framework. Her current research is entitled: "Black Health Matters: National and Transnational COVID-19 Impact, Resistance, and Intervention Strategies Project.  Dr.  Timothy utilizes a methodology entitled : " Resistance Education" in all her work. She has been living with a visual disability for over 25 years.

Host

Dr. Linda Baker is a Psychologist, Assistant Professor – Standing Appointment, and the former Learning Director of the Centre for Research & Education on Violence Against Women & Children (CREVAWC) at Western University. During her time with CREVAWC, Dr. Baker led the Learning Network and the Knowledge Hub. The Learning Network translates knowledge on the continuum of gender-based violence and the Knowledge Hub facilitates a trauma- and violence-informed community of practice with Canadian researchers and practitioners conducting innovative intervention research. She has over 25 years of experience in the mental health and justice systems, working with and learning from children, youth and families dealing with experiences of violence and trauma. Her direct service experience inspires and informs her research and commitment to knowledge translation through resource development and publications, knowledge exchange activities, and workshop presentations. Dr. Baker has co-authored numerous publications/resources related to intimate partner violence exposed children and families, including Walk Proud, Dance Proud: Footprints on a Healing Journey; Helping Children Thrive: Supporting Woman Abuse Survivors as Mothers; and Helping an Abused Woman: 101 things to Know, Say and Do. Her most recent work focuses on the application of intersectionality to research with and services for children exposed to IPV and the evaluation of IPV training programs. Prior to her current roles, Dr. Baker was the Director of the Centre for Children and Families in the Justice System (London Family Court Clinic). She participates regularly on faculty teams delivering Domestic Violence Institutes throughout the United States for the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and Futures Without Violence.

Transcript

00:00:15:19 - Linda

Hello and welcome to today's episode of the podcast Little Eyes Little Ears Centering Children and Youth in Gender-Based Violence Work. This podcast is from the Learning Network at the Centre for Research and Education on Violence against Women and Children at Western University. The purpose of this podcast is to enhance work, to support children and youth in contexts of intimate partner violence.

00:00:43:14 – Linda

I'm Dr. Linda Baker, and I'm pleased to host today's episode with our distinguished guest, Dr. Robert Timothy. Dr. Timothy is an Assistant Professor Black Health Lead and is the inaugural Program Director and creator of the MPH Program in the Field of Black Health at Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. Dr. Timothy is also an Adjunct Professor in Critical Disability Studies at York University. 

00:01:15:06 - Linda

She specializes in the areas of Black health, intersectionality, Black children and families, violence, transgenerational trauma, African-Black Feminisms, ethics in health work, health and racism, art-based methodologies, transnational Indigenous health and anti-oppression, anti-colonial approaches to mental health. Dr. Timothy has worked for over 30 years in community health, working on resisting anti-Black racism and intersectional violence strategies. Dr. Timothy is also co-founder and consultant at Continuing Healing Consultants, where she implements and teaches her intersectional mental health model anti- oppression psychotherapy. 

00:02:02:07 – Linda

She is an interdisciplinary scholar, health practitioner and political scientist who examines global health and ethics from a critical trauma-informed decolonizing framework. Her current research is entitled Black Health Matters: National and Transnational COVID-19 Impact Resistance and Intervention Strategies Project. Dr. Timothy utilizes a methodology entitled Resistance Education in all her work. She has been living with a visual disability for over 25 years. 

00:02:41:12 – Linda

Dr. Timothy, thank you so much for being here with us today. We've really been looking forward to this episode and to having the opportunity to spend some time with you, and I wondered if you'd started off just by positioning yourself, but just telling us a little more about you.

00:02:59:02 - Roberta

Thank you so much, Linda. Thank you for having me.

In terms of locating myself, I stand in solidarity with Indigenous communities in Turtle Island and their fight against colonialism and self-determination and honor our ancestors that have led us here today. I identify as an African transnational Indigenous woman, Black feminist, woman of West African ancestry. My language, tribe, land, name and family have been taken away from me through over 400 years of colonization, anti-Black racism, misogynoir and other forms of intersectional violence.

00:03:34:03 - Roberta

I'm surviving African enslavement through processes of forced migration. My peoples were incarcerated in the Caribbean, Latin America, North America. And as such, I'm intrinsically linked to Indigenous peoples and their struggles for self-determination, reparations and justice as a result of the structural violence and what I call health violence, racism and brutality.

00:03:53:21 - Roberta

I come from a working class background, and I'm always considered a daughter of immigrants. I'm a mother of two living and resisting with the visual disability in Turtle Island, and I actively try to survive, thrive, intentional marginalization and violence sanctioned by the state through processes of existence. That's a little bit about my location. 

00:04:13:05 – Linda

And it certainly helps us see the strong links between your location, your identity, and the work that you've been doing for many years now.

We’re going to talk about intersectionality today, and I wondered if you would begin by explaining what this term that's so widely used as, especially in gender-based violence work, what it means to you?

00:04:46:05 – Roberta

Great. Intersectionality is something that I live for, breathe for. Intersectionality comes from African -Black feminisms, African-Black standpoints, Black women and Indigenous- identified women.

I think that's really important to acknowledge, particularly in current contexts, where sometimes we are erased or that legacy is erased. Many folks know about Kimberlé Crenshaw, the legal scholar and critical race theorist, and she's generally credited with originating the term in the late 1980s. Some activists and scholars, however, trace the earliest articulations of intersectionality back to the seventies in the manifesto by the Combahee River Collective, a collective of Black lesbian-identified feminists who in 1977 said, “We find it difficult to separate race from class from, sex oppression, because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.” In the eighties, many scholars elaborated on the limitations of the isolation of categories such as race, class and gender. as a primary category of identity, the difference or oppression, and their legal implications for particularly Black communities.

00:05:53:15 - Roberta

Feminist scholar Moya Bailey at Northern University has coined the term misogynoir over the past decade on social media, as used to describe the intersection of sexism and racism. But many before Bailey spoke of similar issues. Many Black women in the 1800s and 1900s were discussing how racism and sexism intersect to create a racialized noir misogyny. In 1851, Sojourner Truth, a former enslaved Black woman, talked in her now famous speech, “Ain’t I A Woman” about the complexities and violence of Black, enslaved and poor women experienced living in America.

00:06:27:11 – Roberta

Other women who made these connections during that time period include Mary Church Terrell, Nanny Burroughs, Fanny Barrier Williams, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, and Harriet Tubman to name a few. More recently, Black women who have influenced our knowledge based on intersectionality include Shirley Chisholm, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Assata Shakur, June Jordan, Audré Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Viola Desmond, Carole Boyce Davies, Ama Ata Aidoo, who passed recently in May 2023, Dionne Brand, Amina Mama, and Afua Cooper, among many other folks.

00:07:04:01 – Roberta

The first one is factors of identity, which I'll explain in a second. Oppression is a second. Violence is a third and resistance is the fourth.

I just want to quickly go through these because I think they're important. So, factors of identity, all of who I am, intersectionality embraces the idea of all of who I am. One of the main critical concepts is location. To locate oneself politically and socially means to identify specific factors about your identity. These factors include race, Indigeneity, social, economic status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, spirituality, immigration, refugee status, language, and education to name a few. And one of the ideas of intersectionality is for individuals, groups, and communities to self-identify.

00:07:56:07 - Roberta

This allows people to choose what they share about themselves. For example, I locate myself within the African diaspora as a woman who has survived African enslavement, which I just spoke about, a feminist from a working-class background, etc. Another factor of location is to identify power and unearned privilege. Depending on one's location or locations, one may have power and privilege over others.

I want to give an example now. So, for example, white men have more power and unearned privilege than white women based on systemic oppression supported by patriarchy, sexism, and misogyny. Based on anti-Black racism, Black men have less power and unearned privilege than white men. But because of sexism, they have more unearned privilege than Black women. Even though they experience sexism, white women have more power and unearned privilege than Black women due to anti-Black racism.

 

00:08:46:00 - Roberta

So, there’s different notions of how people experience paradigm and privilege.

The second important factor, I think, in terms of understanding intersectionality is oppression. What is oppression? Oppression is ways of knowing and doing by those with power and authority as individuals and governments and cultural institutions that create marginalization and subjugation of those who do not have institutional authority or power. Often African, Black, Indigenous, poor, racialized folks. We need to understand systemic forms of disempowerment and brutality so we can actively create room for an intersectional analysis.

00:09:21:17 - Roberta

The third approach or point that I think is important for intersectional analysis has to connect is violence, sorry. And violence is an intersectional analysis has to connect the human experiences of violence historically, herstorically, theirhistorically and currently. Violence includes the exercise of power to oppress and discriminate against communities individually and collectively.

Violence is any abuse of power, public, private, and or structural that inflicts harm. Violence includes physical, sexual, and psychological harm, including anti-Black racism, anti-Indigeneity, classism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism to name a few. Violence by police and Black communities is an example of the public and private race, gender, class-based violence. The result is physical, psychological, and financial violence against Black men, women, trans folks, children, and our families.

00:10:14:24 - Roberta

The last significant factor in terms of intersectionality or having intersectional analysis is resistance. Actualizing resistance is critical to intersectionality. Resistance is a struggle to survive, exist, persist, and fight to eradicate ideologies and practices of colonialism, anti-Black racism, and all other forms of intersectional violence in the lives of Black, Indigenous, racialized, and poor folks and our communities. I think there's a couple of other definitions I can give about intersectionality, but I think I'll stop here. I'll stop here.

00:10:53:02 - Linda

Okay. You know, just listening to you describe it, despite your amazing ability to communicate the key tenets of this approach and theory, it is complicated. And I'm just wondering, has that made it difficult for the analysis to occur in the way that you would want it to in terms of communities and also, in terms of researchers and service providers?

00:11:24:01 - Roberta

I think that intersectionality is often, particularly today, people think about intersectionality as coming from, you know, academia or people, you know, I've heard sometimes that this is a very academic conversation.

In fact, it isn't. You know, I come from an activist space of being involved in particularly anti-violence, particularly women abuse or intimate partner violence as it's called more recently. And intersectionality was always there. We were always, you know, fighting for to look at the impact of multiple and simultaneous forms of violence on particularly women or identified women identified in children's lives. So, I think that the complexity sometimes I wonder if the complexity is because it's being used in ways that does that sometimes do not reflect its original form. And I think that when the history, herstory, thei story of African Black feminism and African Black activism is left out, which is the core, I think that leads to these kinds of impasses right like intersectionality, it's hard to do in research is difficult.

I actually teach intersectionality course and one of the main things that I say in the beginning and throughout the course is that it comes from lived experiences and diverse knowledges, and it comes from, you know, Black feminist standpoint and practices or African identified practices, not from academia. Actually, it would be great if intersectionality in academia was, you know, actually being utilized but it's actually a very small portion, right that it's being utilized, gender studies, some social justice studies, some, you know, more progressive programs but, you know, public health in terms of, at least the courses that I teach and other folks some other folks teach, but it's not widespread actually in academia.

00:13:15:08 – Roberta

It's actually used in organizing right, it's used to look at not only how people take up power and how oppression is experienced but also how people resist, and how solidarity can be formed to really do, you know, acts of resistance and advocacy for children, youth, and folks who are who have experienced violence. So, I really think it's, it's complex. It's complex and not complex.

00:13:44:04 – Linda

It's interesting that you say that, Roberta, because I didn’t learn of intersectionality through academia. I’d never heard of it. And it was from the field, it was from the grassroots movements and the wonderful activists that first introduced me to the concept and then you go back in and search and find things through gender studies as you said, but not in, not in learning to be a psychologist. Wasn't there. I am pleased to let you know Dr. Timothy that the current graduate program is introducing and it's a place of much. It just makes me so pleased to see that it's at least present. And they're making a real effort, but it was absolutely absent.

00:14:30:18 – Linda

I just also am interested in your opinion like as you say it's existed, it maybe had different terms, that people expressed it differently. But it’s been on the ground, in communities resisting that understanding for decades. What’s changed or led to the fact that it’s being embraced much more widely across different groups?

00:14:54:06 - Roberta

I think that the, I mean, the impact of, you know, different forms of violence in our society and I think the, the advocacy and the activism that has occurred from various groups, you know, from feminist movement, queer movements, Indigenous or transnational Indigenous movements, all, you know, anti-violence movements against any form of violence to women and children.

I think those have actually, you know, kind of pressured folks to make these changes I don't think the changes were like hey we're going to make this change we're going to do intersectionality. I think it comes from, you know, the push the fight the fight to do so, folks asking, you know, when they're in organizations or they're organizing community or in academia like, how can we, how can we do this work and we can we don't look at the differences and the similarities and the, you know, the different ways of how we identify or how we've experienced oppression. So, I think it comes from knowledge sharing but it also comes from that fighting like it's that resistance, that it's still not enough or not fully integrated you know intersectionality is not integrated in most spaces, even most workplaces, but I think it comes from that approach. I'm thinking even of a story of my mom she, you know she came here as a domestic worker at 21, and went back to school when she had four kids after divorce, etc. In her 40s, and she was in gender studies, women in gender studies and sociology, and a lot of the complexities and you know I was a child who went eating French fries, you know, listening to a lot of things. And a lot of the complexities were, you know, Black women, Indigenous woman, queer women fighting to be represented even within the gender space right so right now what we see is transnational

feminism was not the case necessarily in the 80s right.

00:16:50:10 – Linda

And I can just… makes me think about some of the dangers as you say when it becomes extracted from the roots and the core origins, foundations of this approach then the implications for policy when the word is being used, but the true essence and understanding of intersectionality is lost.

00:17:20:04 – Roberta

100%. I even think saying you know sometimes it's called you know the impact of white supremacy and patriarchy, is it's whitewashed right, it's not, the original form is no more. And it's another example of anti-Black racism, misogynoir, so it's critical when we talk about intersectionality to talk about that history, herstory, theirstory to talk about African Black women's not only creation but fight to be included. And also, I mean, how amazing to use this as an intersectional theory. It can be used in research, it can be used in practical ways I mean it's just a really important, I think, tool. Right. That folks can use and you can use it, also, if you, you know, you come from different backgrounds, everybody has an intersectional identity, right.

So, it's how you use it in hopefully using it in a way that can be impactful and make change and create social justice spaces and places instead of just us places and spaces I think is important.

00:17:20:04 – Linda

You know, Dr Timothy I'm thinking of the young French fry eating Roberta. Learning at the knees or beside her mother, who sounds like she was an amazing woman. And I'm just wondering, that's a nice segue into why is an intersectional approach so important in supporting children and youth who've experienced adversity such as exposure to intimate partner violence?

00:19:00:06 – Roberta

Right. That's so important, I think. An intersectional approach is critical in supporting children and youth who've experienced adversity, violence such as exposure to IPV because it’s a tool to understand the multiple experiences of violence and resistance that children have. It gives a more detailed account of children’s and youth’s diverse experiences which is needed when creating interventions to support a child who has witnessed or experienced violence.

An intersectional approach looks at how factors such as Indigeneity, colonialism, race, racism, gender, sexism, misogyny, misogynoir, violence against women and children, gender identity, transphobia, violence against trans folks, sexual orientation, heterosexism, heteronormativity, homophobia, violence against queer folks, age, disability, violence against folks who need accessible support in a ableist world, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, violence against indigenous spiritualities, transgenerational trauma, among others.

How do folks resist fight back against multiple, simultaneous, in many cases forms of violence? An intersectional approach supports not only broadening the understanding of children and youth's life histories, herstories, and theirstories, but also contextualizes their experiences of violence while getting to know their identities, the impacts and their actions, all needed to continue to support wellness and healing for differently located children and youth exposed to IPV and other forms of violence.

Another way of saying this is that to really understand a child or youth exposure to IPV and other forms of violence, practitioners, folks, need to understand their own locations and their child and youth or their families, intersectional identities and experiences. This understanding has to come from a decolonized, anti-racist, anti-oppression framework in order to not harm or re-harm survivors of IPV and other traumas.

00:20:49:04 – Linda

Dr. Timothy, can you give us some examples of how intersectionality can be brought to life on the ground?

00:20:56:17 – Roberta

Yes. Thank you, Linda. I've worked 17 years frontline work with children who witness and experience intimate partner violence and other forms of trauma using art-based approach expressive arts from a decolonizing, intersectional approach. Working with individuals and groups have been really important for intersectional work. I think looking even at things such as intakes, like how your intakes were created to gather information, but also to create spaces where diverse identities were allowed or needed, different forms of arts were brought to discuss, the impact and multiplicity or intensity and resistance, how folks survived. These are questions that you need to know before you actually do a group on intersectionality.

This is what I used to what I use in creating these groups, imagining some in some cases how survival would look like in a space where racism, for example, lives was to create supportive places, to unpack and strategize next steps in one’s healing process through visual arts movements, music, children and youth and mummies even in some cases were allowed to express their experiences, feeling and learning new strategies for coping and share old ones that worked.

I was a project coordinator for the first Parenting After Violence group in North America, and the group was using you know expressive arts from an anti-oppression approach and intersectional lens and we talked about parenting after violence but also parenting after violence in the context of racism, parenting after violence, but in the context of, you know, living with very little money or housing. Living in housing that wasn’t housing that had a lot of issues of not only racism, but also just structural issues, looking at food insecurity in terms of parenting after violence. and not having that money, that support, etc.

00:22:44:06 - Roberta

So, I think there's many different ways when we look at how we do intersectional work, that we can actually include that, that folks who are experiencing IPV, children and youth, are experiencing sometimes multiple forms of violence. Right. And that there's different ways to resist. So, some folks would say, well, you know, I created a kind of a dinner, a dinner thing with my neighbor and what we did is that we shared rice. We bought a big bag of rice, and we shared that. We made one pot food and we shared it with the kids, you know, made cookies and we shared it with the neighbors. And that happened in group and then those discussions. So, I think it's important to look outside of the box when we're looking at how we can support folks and intersectional approach to doing work with folks or doing work with children, youth and families is really important.

00:23:29:22 – Roberta

I recently facilitated a Black youth therapy group and utilized spoken word to speak about the impact of anti-Black racism and other forms of violence during COVID 19. We had a session when George Floyd's killers were being sentenced. It was very intense, lots of anxiety and fear, but allowing the youth to speak about the diverse experience of police violence and racism, their experiences of multiple pandemics that were occurring at the same time was an empowering experience.

So, I think looking at intersectional ways to work with children and youth who have experienced multiple forms of violence and multiple forms of resistance is to be creative and it's to be outside of the box and to be flexible.

00:24:15:18 - Linda

Those are very helpful examples. You know, there’s such tension between this fidelity to the model, the manualized kind of approach and what you just described, which is responding and being creative and meeting children where they're at and youth where they are at.

You know, when you talk about resistance, it's not that long ago that in “helper's” worlds, in terms of sort of more traditional models of supporting children and youth, resistance was seen as something that was a negative. You know, like this child is resisting this or resisting help, resisting treatment, et cetera. And I think that one of the things that has been so beneficial in terms of the intersectional approach is helping us to understand what's really meant by resistance and where that's coming from and the strength that it embodies. And I'm wondering if you can give us some sort of more concrete examples of the kinds of resistance that one might see in a very young child, for instance, Dr. Timothy, or in a child that’s in school age, but some of the things that people may see and if they haven’t had the benefit of attending one of your classes and they haven’t been involved in some of the activism in communities, that they may not recognize that what they're seeing is the strength of that young person and their resistance against oppressions.

00:25:57:02 - Roberta

Definitely. Resistance is just everything. I think when you say resistance, I have to first think about my own resistance as a child and growing up in a working class environment and experiencing anti-Black racism on the daily. It was so critical for me to understand that I was a part of a larger African community and I was involved in a larger feminist community and Pan-African community and I was involved in as a kid and my mom was involved in anti-apartheid work in the Canadian context and we were too as children boycotting everything, everything, everything. And when I experienced on the school yard in my neighborhood really anti-Black racist slurs, the N-word on a daily basis, I knew that I came from bigger and better places. I knew that I was involved in activism for a community against anti-Black racism. I went to marches, I went to songs, I went to plays. I was in a play very young African Caribbean play about resistance in the Black community back in the days. That helped me when I experienced those forms of violence and also living in a poor community.

My mom still had a little garden into different things. So even though we were dealing with multiple factors of violence in my life, I had other ways of identifying that were so positive and healing for me so that I knew knowing some of the history and herstory of anti-Black racism in the Canadian context and globally was healing for me. When people spoke ill and violent, I had another ear speaking to me and I thought I was a beautiful African, I told you, African princess.

00:28:00:02 - Roberta

I'm queen now but I was African princess at that point. It was really amazing how you can walk through experiences of daily violence but still think about yourself as beautiful and loving and amazing and also being able to talk to my mom about these experiences and her hugs and her walks that we did and runs and always saying that that's not who you are and talking about racism. For me, racism was learned and how to deal with it and how to resist against it was from my family's love and love of self and community and being allowed to, I remember being allowed to be emotional.

I work with a lot of people in terms of the mental health piece and impacts of violence and not being able to have emotional expression for these types of violence kills folks. It kills you, right? It doesn't allow you to breathe and being able to do that is just so powerful. I think resistance for me has never been the way it's looked at in traditional psychology or Eurocentric notions of psychology. It always has been resisting systems of oppression and violence and this is learned from a young child. When I work with children and I did many years of work with children, I always talk about how they identify and how important they identify. Even sometimes utilizing something that would be really simple about their name and where does their name come from?

00:29:35:24 – Roberta

I remember working in shelters and a child would change their name to an English name and a child would immigrate to Canada and talking about their name and what it meant made such a difference for children who experience bullying or violence in different ways or to look at the importance of not saying yes to everybody, to have your difference of opinion, etc. Resistance is a way to not only survive but to thrive. It's always sometimes challenging when you hear no, you change it to yes. No, you cannot do that. No, you're not good.

Changing that to yes you are and these are the ways I can do this and this is the ways I will achieve. It's not that it's necessarily means that you don't have struggles but it changes that kind of notion. When a client doesn't come back to therapy, for me, I got to look at myself and think that might be the only time in this client's life, I'm talking about child, and also adults, that they can actually empower themselves to say, you know, what I don't want to come today or forever, depending on what it is. I got to look at what I've done, what I need to do but it could be an empowering thing for that person and how do I work with that as a mental health practitioner?

So, it's a really important piece of the work. Without resistance, I don't think we can actually have change. I don't think we can have justice if we don't resist these normalities that are problematic, these acts, these things that we think are, you know, they just have to be, including our current system today. We need a challenge that this is inevitable. Resistance challenges, inevitableness, that violence will exist and that we will always experience pain and not experience justice and healing. Resistance says no, no, oh, that's not going to happen.

00:31:45:20 - Linda

To bring our discussion to a closure Dr Timothy, I wonder if you could share with us: what's your hope for the next 20 years? What would you like to see change in how we support children and youth when it comes to intersectionality? 

00:32:06:10 – Roberta

I love this question. I think it's so important to look in the future as we live our current experience and always look back also, right. So, I have a couple of things to say. My hope for the next 20 years is that exposure to violence is lessened in our communities. I hope that healing from current and transgenerational trauma can continue to move us forward and lessen the harm and retraumatization that occurs when the intersectional experiences of children, youth, and families are not explored, or are explored in ways that do not create empowerment wellness and healing. I hope that we can provide more resources and sources of transnational Indigenous ways of healing and knowing for BIPOC communities and fruitful amounts of different ways of healing from IPV. I hope that Black and Indigenous children and our families are not criminalized or incarcerated in systems that were curated to dehumanize us.

Instead of taking away our children,I'd love to see your place or places where folks can live together and be supported if needed, houses for folks who are struggling to live with kids and supports to keep families together, especially when we have histories, herstories, theirstories of  separation and residential schools. I hope our children, youth, women, men, trans folks are not killed in our communities, and we practice youth services from 13 to 29 years old. We remember this and mourn for the loss of so many youth to gun violence and other forms of brutality.

I hope that quote unquote, allyship which is very often not practiced, and in fact a painful lip service turns active and it moves into solidarity action against all forms of violence in our communities. And my last hope, I may have more, but we'll just say one more. I hope that teaching, learning, and unlearning on intersectionality continues from African Black feminist practices and transgenerational knowledge is favored in practice, and our legacy is upheld and not erased. I hope we continue to resist and fight for the lives of our children and youth, resist systems that disvalue and harm them, including familial ones, provide creative spaces that allow our children and youth to live. Dream, make mistakes. and still be empowered, cared for, loved, housed, fed, educated within community as well as non-violent educational experiences. I hope that we continue to resist and be able to live healthy and well lives. Thank you.

00:34:23:05 – Linda  

Thank you. It's a vision of the future that I think we can all embrace.

Dr. Roberta Timothy, this has been a wonderful opportunity to sit and chat with you. I want to thank you so much on behalf of the Learning Network, and I know that what you’ve said will resonate with so many people who will have an opportunity to listen to this podcast. So, thank you so much.

00:34:55:21 - Roberta

Thank you so much, Linda for having me. And you know, I just want to kind of leave with the fact that transnationally many nameless Black women in our communities and professional spaces spoke about the intersections of her life as women as Black and poor and their experiences stem directly from shared histories and herstories and theirhistories of colonialism, enslavement, industrialization and democratization on the backs of African Indigenous Peoples. Different phrases were used to describe their conditions but the words and actions mobilize Black, Indigenous and racialized women globally to examine how race gender and class and other factors simultaneously impact our life and how we resist, continue to resist, resistance is inevitable.

00:35:32:21 - Roberta

Thank you. To our audience, please stay tuned. Watch for an email from the Learning Network when the next episode of this series is available. Again, thank you, Dr. Timothy.

00:35:46:21 - Roberta

Thank you so much, Dr. Baker.