JUSTICE
Decolonizing Chicago Native American organizer on the intersection of Black Lives Matter and decolonization BY JACQUELINE SERRATO Janie Pochel is co-founder and lead advisor of Chi-Nations Youth Council, which helped organize the July 17 solidarity rally that set the stage for the City’s removal of three Christopher Columbus statues in Grant Park, Little Italy, and South Chicago. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Visit our website for the full version. The conversation about the fake history surrounding Christopher Columbus goes back a long time, at the very least to the 1960s, and there’s also a rich history in Latin America of Indigenous communities toppling monuments of colonizers. So what exactly created the momentum for the removal of Columbus in various cities like Minneapolis and Chicago. And is there any connection to Black Lives Matter? Yeah, I think it’s directly correlated with Black Lives Matter. I know at least in decolonial work I do, decolonization is not only the return of land, but it’s also the abolishment of slavery. Because those things are what colonized our lands. So if we’re gonna work on getting our land back, we have to also abolish slavery at the same time. And as we know, as American history, slavery never ended—they just switched it over to the prison industrial complex. So, we’ve been doing uprisings, like Idle No More was one, Standing Rock was another one. And when those opportunities come about, we’re gonna jump on them. So when we seen everybody getting, you know, “woke,” they started saying, “Oh, you can’t have justice on stolen land,” but you’re not even bringing us into these conversations. When we were talking [among ourselves] about how Natives are going to support this movement, we didn’t want it to be like the oppression olympics. We wanted it to be intentional, to build an actual coalition between Native and Black communities. 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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Are members of Chi-Nations Youth Council part of a nation or tribe or are you open to anyone who identifies as Native American? We don’t really card anybody; It’s mostly self-identified Natives. Everybody in our group right now is attached to a federal tribe in some way as a dependent or a member, but in the past we’ve had it open. Like two of the Hawaiian kids don’t feel comfortable being part of the group, but the kids accept them as part of the group. Hawaiians aren’t federally recognized. One of the first members was actually from somewhere in Central America, they were Native from there and they didn’t have any recognition. Most of the kids are recognized in some way, but we are open to any youth that identifies as Native and wants to be part of the group. Ages thirteen to twenty-four is what we say, but we have younger, ten- to thirteen-yearolds who come to the programs and are not really members of the group, but are going to be members of the group.
“Decolonization is not only the return of land, but it’s also the abolishment of slavery” Some people were surprised by the attempt to remove the statue after the Black Indigenous Solidarity Rally at Buckingham Fountain. It seemed like not everyone was aware that people were going to bring it down the same day. Do you know why there was confusion?
People just don’t expect that kind of action from Chicago, just because we’ve been so tame and peaceful for so long, that as soon as somebody got inspired to fight back against the cops, it was like a contagious courage went through the crowd. I know that some people were confused, but... I think the people that were keeping up with what’s going on around the country, as soon as we got to the Columbus statue, I think that’s when [their] minds started going like, “We’re gonna take this down.” So after the rally, we made it clear that we don’t police people’s protests and that we’re going to protect each other. So I think people got all inspired by seeing the solidarity, they just decided, you know, ‘let’s try to take these statues down,’ and eventually they did come down. So even if it wasn’t successful then, you know, it ended up coming down in the end. And we got to laugh in JohnFOP-what’s-his-name’s face, while it was going down. A lot of people don’t know much about Native American history in Chicago or Illinois, but if you could tell people something that they need to know about their history, what would you tell them? Definitely the people of the Three Fires: Odawa, Potawatomi, Ojibwa, which are like the colonial names. Then Miami, Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Meskwaki, Sauk... so Chicago’s been a city for a long time and there’s actually, I can go over 100 different nations that claim it as part of their ancestral territory, but I think those are the most prominent in a city that still has tribal members. They’re not really a big concentration. Like Albany Park has a lot of Natives; in West Rogers Park there’s a group of Natives, and I think on the South Side there’s a pretty big [community]. The 70s or 80s is when our neighborhood got broken up, and since then we’ve just kind of been all
over. But through mutual aid, we noticed a lot of Native people just live on the outskirts of the city. Way on the North Side, way on the West Side, or way on the South Side. There’s not really a lot in the middle. The name of the event was “Decolonize...” and I’m assuming this is the Indigenous name for Chicago and I don’t know how to pronounce it and I don’t want to mess it up. Do you know how to pronounce it? It’s Zhigaagoong (she-gah-goo). It’s actually not the official Ojibwa word. We’re Soto Ojibwa, which is a different dialect, so that’s what we would call it. I noticed that CPD, the mayor, and also Trump weaponized this event to make a statement about Black Lives Matter and GoodKids MadCity, even though there were many players, including Indigenous and brown people. How were you reacting to the way the media and politicians were using this event to advance their own agendas? I seen it as a way for them to use their power to put everyone in their place. And since they don’t really know, most people don’t really know a lot about Natives and how to come at us, that they wanted to punish us in some way, so they chose to punish people on the South and West Sides, which are predominantly Black. And that’s just part of America, colonialism, trying to keep everybody in their place. But to us, we see it as scapegoating and definitely targeted based on race. And even when they were taking the statue down [days later], it kinda felt like they were trying to put something in between [it and] the solidarity that was going on because that might’ve been seen as a Native win, and they attacked Black people at the same time. But we seen it as a win for both Black people and Native
