***Please note that this event was originally scheduled for Friday, March 26, and is now scheduled for Friday, April 9.***
In the midst of a pandemic, many are tending to our relationalities as sites of renewed hope and healing. Those of us who live with pain, madness, and disabilities have always created networks of care beyond the state’s recognition toward our survival. From a lens of nēhiyaw philosophy, Indigenous medicines have an extraordinary amount to teach us in our pursuit of collective liberation, yet the same is true regarding a range of suppressed and illegalized substances. As long as the project of abolition is unfinished, Black and Indigenous life will remain the battlegrounds of racist drug laws, policing, and imprisonment. Erica Violet Lee refuses the immateriality of liberal Indigenous rights and recognition discourses, in favour of an erotic ecology of intoxication, examining the spiritual-biological uses of altered consciousness - and the stuff that brings us there.
Erica Violet Lee is a nēhiyaw writer and scholar from west side Saskatoon. She holds an MEd in Social Justice Education from OISE at the University of Toronto. Erica tweets @ericavioletlee.
Click here to join the event on April 9th.