Season 4, ep 26: Weirding Time! with: Uli, Jams, carla joy, and a Time Talks History segment

In the season four opener, Uli, carla, and jams introduce some dreams for season 4, ruminate about other projects on the horizon, and reflect on their year off from making the Grounded Futures Show, and more! Plus, we will hear the first Time Talks History segment about the Doctrine of Discovery. 

Thanks for listening! 🌀

Show notes:

• Grounded Futures Book Club on Discord (email or dm us if this link doesn't work)
• Time Talks podcast
• Storyloom
• On Belonging
• Wording Our Worlds workbook
• Vicky Osterweil

Transcripts

Credits:

• The GF Show is created by Uli, carla joy, and jams
• Time Talks History is created by chris time steele
• Music for the show is by Zach F. Bergman/Sour Gout
• Mastered by Listening House/Chris Bergman

Time Talks History sources (in order) and further readings:

• The Racial Contract by Charles W. Mills
• An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
• Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
• Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery by Steven Newcomb
• Discourse on Colonialism by Aime Cesaire
• Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze
• Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome by Joy DeGruy
• Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism by J. Kehaulani Kauanui
• The Dawning of the Apocalypse by Gerald Horne

Further Reading:

• American Holocause by David Stannard
• The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
• Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano
• Silencing the Past by Michel-Rolph Trouillot
• Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating & Empire Building by Richard Drinnon
• Killing Rage: Ending Racism by bell hooks

Magneto: I know the kind of pain you're feeling, Alex. I once had it myself.

Alex: You some kind of doctor? Magneto: No, Alex. I am Magneto, and I have come to offer you… Sanctuary.

Uli: Hi everybody, this is Uli, and I'm joined here with carla and Jams to introduce Season 4 of The Grounded future show and we'll talk a bit about that today. And yeah, thank you for being here.

carla: Hi, Uli, it's good to be back.

Uli: Yeah, it's really great. -

Jams: It's so good to be back. It's been a long time for me since I've

been here.

carla: Yeah, I know. You did first season with us with the training and

everything and the launch and then two years without you and then a hiatus. I can't believe it's literally our fifth year of Grounded Futures but it's season four of the show.

Jams: You know what's really wild is like Rook sitting behind me on the couch eating his quesadilla being five years old and the very first episode that we all recorded together, Rook was like less than a year old and I was so hormonal and emotional, and I remember that I cried afterwards, and it's really been, yeah, it's such a journey.

and that we'll have guests now and again. And sometimes it'll just be me and Uli and the guests. And sometimes it’ll be Jams and Uli and a guest. And sometimes, you know, it'll be a configuration of the three of us. And that's for access reasons. It's for joyful reasons, but Jams can talk about her reasons in a minute. In the past, Uli and I have done little segments like delighting in

our friends. But this year, we're weaving in more formally, I guess, where we've invited in other folks to do it. And we'll talk about that in a minute. And we're going to share the first one this episode. And so it's going to have

its own flow. There won't be an episode every month. There might be two some months, and some months none. And they will be emergent. That's kind of the jist of it.

Uli: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, what we're wanting to do on this season is step more into what we originally planned for the show, to talk about climate change, and yeah, all that stuff, all the stuff we originally wanted to do for

the workshop for this. And we're hoping to actually touch on that more in this

season.

carla: Yeah, and just go head on into the notion of collapse. The good,

the hard, the beautiful of collapse and change.

Jams: And all the ways that we're finding connections and webs of care

and ways of being grounded and ungrounded all together.

carla: Yeah, yeah, I love that. We've been talking a lot about being ungrounded, but I would like to like orient kind of the intention around the show, around a quote from Alice Walker. I'm reading her book, "The Temple of My Familiar" right now, and it's a quote in the book, and it says, "Keep in mind always the present, you are constructing. It should be the future you want.” Yeah.

Jams: I think too, there's like a piece in there for me that resonates around like, well, maybe it's like the collapse of timelines, right? We actually are already in the future. We have been talking about all of these things for so long. So what actions are we

taking? Yeah.

carla: Yeah, I love that. Yeah. Collapsing timelines.

Jams: Yeah, our Grounded Futures are now. Yeah, exactly. But Uli, did you want to share another thing that we're doing?

Uli: Yeah, one of our things that we're planning to do is host Grounded Futures show book club over on Discord. I'm doing this because I have a hard time prioritizing reading and I want to do it with a community. We're going to start with short stories and essays that we will share for free to keep it accessible. So basically just a little fun book club on Discord and we'll make sure to post out the invite code as soon as it's up.

carla: Yeah, and sometimes it will connect with a guest we're having on, sometimes in subtle ways, and sometimes maybe what we read will connect with the segment that we're going to start this year off with, which is called “Time Talks History”, with chris time steele, a sort of riff off his incredible podcast called “Time Talks”.

He's an incredible historian. He really focuses on colonialism and propaganda and the impacts of that, and has an ability to uncover less heard or purposely buried histories and stories. And has a way to weave it into the present in a way that's really beautiful and necessary. And the first one you're going to hear today is “Doctrine of Discovery”. We're just going to go right into American exceptionalism and all the problems that it has caused for hundreds of years. So I'm really excited to share that. And once we have a handful of them, we'll share them as standalone shorts.

Jams: I'm gonna ask you a question. I'm gonna ask the two of you a question. Are you ready for that?

carla: Yes.

Uli: Yeah.

Jams: Well, I just wanted to say like: what have you been up to? What have you been doing throughout the hiatus?

Uli: I know I just feel like I haven't done… I've done a lot, also not. I mean we did

the Story Loom thing which was really cool, which was kind of intertwined with what all this is anyways so that was really fun yeah.

carla: I think that you told me what you loved about it, because you were saying it's like probably one of the highlights of all of "Grounded Futures"

Uli: It's definitely one of the highlights 'cause I feel like I actually did something very community based and I feel like I don't get to do that that much, living the way I do right now. And I got to work with friends and I got to do all those other things. And it was so intergenerational and stuff. It was a really fun thing to do. But otherwise, I don't know, I've just been staying creative and doing so many other little things all year long, that are just little projects here and there and dreaming.

carla: You turned 20.

Uli: I turned 20,

carla: You were 16 when we started.

Uli: Right, Yeah, I think there's a lot of things that have happened, but mostly just been continuing to do great things and fun things.

carla: Follow the passions

Uli: Follow the passions. Yeah. And hobbies.

carla: I mean, I didn't know we would be back for a fourth season. I'm really grateful for Uli wanting to Start these shows again, partly because he articulated that meeting people and having conversations with folks who he wouldn't meet and engage with otherwise is really fun. And also amplifying people's stories and their ideas is really, really good. And Uli also made some incredible art around Palestine and solidarity that was really awesome for our platform, for like the social media. You made it for yourself to help process, but we asked to share it.

Uli: Yes.

carla: Yeah. Yeah. I think the highlight in terms of this project for me of the year was “On Belonging” for all the heartache that's wrapped up in that project, particularly losing my dear friend, Klee Benally, and I'm just forever grateful that he gifted the world with a story like it for On Belonging that really has a feeling… to talk about collapsing timelines… It feels like it's a gift from an elder in so many ways, like something, you know? Like that he went way into the future and said that story for future generations, future elders, descendants. So yeah. But overall, like the whole project and every story, and working with you Jams. That was definitely in terms of this work we're doing on this project was absolutely the highlight for me. And I've done, you know, I do other things, many other things, but I just want to keep it focused here.

Uli: Yes. There's a lot of little personal things.

carla: How about you, Jams?

Jams: It’s not just we’re like “collapsing the timeline”, it is also cool to see the timeline, you know? Like the sort of linear parallels of this project. Yeah, I mean, it's been like, you know, if folks did listen to on belonging, I feel like carla and I did get pretty vulnerable and open and a little bit raw, maybe. And talked about how intense, in a beautiful way, that project was. And I'd say like that project really informed how I moved forward into Storyloom. And I think it also, like Storyloom was the event we did, it was also sort of like the start of redefining what we're doing with this project overall, with this like, you know, platform that we have, I guess. And the stories that we heard in “On Belonging” came like, for me, at a really synchronistic time of like my life where I was really trying to figure out a lot of stuff about belonging where you choose to live. And part of hosting Storyloom in Victoria was me choosing to be here and host something in the community that I'm currently taking up space in. And I don't think we would have done Storyloom the event the way that we did it if we didn't do “On Belonging”. So I think that those two things are both really key and and really important and cool to hear that on either end, those are sort of highlights for both of you. So that's cool. Yeah. What have I been doing? I mean, I've been really trying to listen to myself a little bit more, I think. Yeah, it's like, I'm really in my era of asking for help when I need it, also communicating like what I want to be a part of, which is like ridiculously challenging sometimes as a single mom, like, you know, I'm like, well, you know, I could use help in these very specific ways. Also, I'd like to be a part of that. I don't know how to make that work, but also like, could I be a part of it, please? You know, like just asking for what I need more and not like… I feel like I have a really wonderful, beautiful relationship with my kid, and I have this deep understanding of the way that him and I are growing together. But I think I've really neglected my own personal growth, and “On Belonging” brought that out for me. Doing that project brought that out, and made me realize that I hadn't really focused on my own belonging in a really long time. Anyway, all year, I should say, “On Belonging” came out in like December/January, and then all year I've really been taking classes I want to take, like learning things I want to learn. And, you know, like I'm like living the youth autonomy, kind of rad mom life, but also, like, I get to be a part of that. That's the actual rad part, right? Anyway, so that's what I've been doing this year, since like, you know, hiatus, and also my life since this project and how I've been. And it's obviously because of the relationship that I have with you two that this project runs these parallels with my personal life because we are actually like an interwoven little collaborative unit and big choices come in life and then they seem to also manifest in what we do together.

carla: That's beautiful.I love it. That is some serious grounding for futures. This is beautiful and it's been really neat watching you follow your passions. You and Liam both like, "I'm interested in this, I'm gonna learn this." Like Liam did a holistic nutrition course this year and you did your stuff, but I don't know how much you want to say, but it's been like just really cool to follow, just to witness you both follow your interests. And so it's just been really neat to see you to embrace unschooling in the true meaning of the word. As a fan of the meaning.

carla: Neither of my co-hosts here know this. But one of the things we always did on the show was, because we are all word nerds, is to talk about words. And the thing that's been orbiting my mind for weeks, and I want to take the opportunity to take up space about: I'm really not having a really good time seeing that the word weird is being used in a way to talk about people like Trump or about like systems like capitalism, because as someone who is always identified as a weirdo, really because I care about the meaning of words and the use of them through literature and history, and the word literally just means destiny. And it was really like about having those who use weirdness control, or respond to and like shape what our lives are like, and then of course, Shakespeare, the Wyrd Sisters was about the faded sisters and like witches — like it literally has origins in being a witch and about casting spells for the good— about the weirding way and Dun. Like it's about kind of like a departure from empire. And so I just really, you don't, no, you don't get to take this word from us punks over here. And like, I'm a weirdo, I do the weirding way and I weird time and I weird stuff and I weirded what a family can look like. And I just, this is an invitation to folks who are falling into the traps of propaganda with words like this and then using it in radical spaces. Please stop. You're hurting my heart. And I just like that is like not a word for those folks. No. So that's my little spiel. My word is a little bit charged.

Uli: Yeah. No, I mean, it's that thing, right? Like you can just like for those kind of people, you can just call them what they are: bad people.

carla: It comes back to wording our worlds.

Uli: Like you don't have to think of going into the weird or the ableist or the misusing of words. You can just say what it is, that they're just bad people.

carla: An asshole.

Uli: An asshole.

carla: Yeah.

Uli: Like you don't have to.

carla: Capitalism is violence.

Uli: Yeah.

carla: Capitalism is not, capitalism actually isn't weird. No.

Uli: It's actually the norm.

carla: It's actually the opposite. So can we just stop, thanks.

Uli: Yeah.

carla: But, you know, thanks for agreeing. And it does connect to the workbook we're working on, called "Wording Our Worlds." It's an invitation to work on all the ways we replicate empire and the systems that dominate and control by using language in a way that causes more harm or continues the domination. And so it's gonna be joyous. It's gonna have fun art in it. And Jams and I are working on it. But yeah, I'm curious if either of you have a word that's a favourite word right now, or like that's causing you…?

Jams: Okay, I have one and I don't think it's like… so in my, you know, J -O -B capitalism job. I write a lot about environmental rights. And the word environment is just fucking with me now. Honestly lost meaning to me. And I'm like, you know, obsessed with the word ecosystem. We love the idea of ecosystems. I think that actually means something to me at this point, right? Like your environment can change and, you know, protecting the environment doesn't really mean anything because everybody's relationship to the environment is different, but an ecosystem is something that's interdependent. And yeah, like an ecosystem is this like, it's everything that we always talk about. It's a web of connections and I just kind of currently hate the word… I think it's just bleh and it means nothing.

carla: Thank you for sharing.

Jams: Yeah. Like within the job that I'm working at, like there's, you know, like a lot of, you know, white environmentalism.

carla: it's just like white feminism.

Jams: It's really the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's just a sanitized version of like a real movement.

Uli: Yeah, totally.

Jams: Anyways, I'm surviving.

carla: Yeah, yeah, how about you, Uli?

Uli: I'm not sure if I have one.

carla: I mean, I think we talk about weird all the time.

Uli: Yeah.

carla: I probably stole your thunder.

Uli: Definitely, definitely talk about it a lot. Yeah, I don't know if I have one myself though. I think I do really enjoy it, I can't think of one on the top of my head right now, but I do enjoy finding words from history that aren't used anymore.

carla: Like recovering old words?

Uli: Yeah, history words like English ones and stuff. I do enjoy doing that. So finding ones that were used hundreds and hundreds of years ago or whatever. And those kinds of words that I'm like, why did we stop using this? It's literally explaining the thing that everyone uses the wrong word for, you know, there's so many of those things or sentences or whatever, that's like, I don't know if I can think of any examples, but yeah I wish I could, because

carla: I know you mean…

Uli: I mean, you think about some of the things like that we still use in our culture today or whatever from like hundreds and hundreds of years ago and how it was probably just like a little made up story, an accident or there's so many

carla: Most religions.

Uli: Yeah, it's just like these little… but it's become like integral parts when sometimes that wasn't the purpose of the story, because storytellers… the whole point is that they exaggerate and they make things kind of bigger.

carla: It's called a metaphor.

Uli: Yeah

carla: Yeah that's really cool. I love that it's good nuance. Yeah amidst and alongside all the storms from like… literally every day there's a flood somewhere or a hurricane somewhere or landslide somewhere or fire somewhere all the collapsing of ecosystems everywhere and the wars and the ongoing genocide in Palestine and I just just want to acknowledge that and I don't have any advice. I just want to acknowledge it. Like, it's a grief. Yeah. May you continue to be weird, have mornas, and fight like hell for justice and freedom for all.

Jams: Yeah, you know, and collapse the timelines.

carla: Collapse the timelines! Yeah. And yeah, enjoy this segment and we'll be back in a couple weeks probably with our first guest, Vicky Osterweil, and a new segment and more

from there.

Uli: Yep

Jams. Thank you both so much.

carla:Thank you, Jams.

Uli: And now for a Time Talks History by chris time steele.

chris: Hey everyone. This is the first segment of Time Talks history. I want to thank carla and Uli and the Grounded Futures team for having me. This is going to be a quick deep dive on the Doctrine of Discovery and colonialism, primarily in North and South America, which is all Indigenous land.

To give a further background on this, scholars like Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz have pointed out that these early forms of colonialism date back to the Crusades and to when England colonized Ireland and then made Irish reservations. Gerald Horn points out in his book The Dawning of the Apocalypse, that embryo is a whiteness transitioned from religion to a race -based global White Supremacy. So to go into the doctrine of discovery, it was an apocalypse and it spawned domination in what bell hooks called white-supremacist-imperialist-patriarchy, and this domination sought to attack people's ways of life and knowing in Africa and North and South America, disrupting gender, sexuality, education, language, religion, spirituality, family, and community structures, hierarchy on children, relationships with time, and culture as a whole.

And I want to start with a quote by Aime Cesaire, who said, "Europe is responsible for the human community for the highest heap of corpses in history." And just to give a context on this, on how the European Enlightenment and the role it played in this, it ties in with philosophy, intellectualism, universities that upheld this colonialism and still do, and global White Supremacy and its tie-in with science. So just a few examples. Emanuel Easy explains that many philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as David Hume, Emanuel Kant and Hegel wrote about racial superiority and hierarchy of race with Europeans at the top, where "reason" and "civilization" became almost synonymous with "white people" in Northern Europe, while "unreason" and "savagery" were conveniently located among the non-whites. And Robert Bernusconi have pointed out that Immanuel Kant had created the quote "scientific concept of race" and when taking a deeper look at Kant's anthropology lectures, he says there's no hope for Native Americans to be educated. There's some hope for Africans. He said if they are beaten with a quote "split bamboo cane." Another example in a most political science curriculum, John Locke is introduced as one of the inspirational architects of the Declaration of Independence in the United States Constitution. Well, the influence of the Iroquois Confederacy is often omitted or scarcely covered. Author Charles Mills noted that Locke argued that God gave the world to, quote, "the use of the industrious," end quote, and rational, which was, quote “the central pillar of the expropriation contract used in U .S. Africa and the Pacific.” And then Mills also points out that Locke was against, quote, ‘hereditary slavery and enslavement of wives and children, but he was invested in the Royal Africa Company and helped write the slave constitution of the Carolinas”. So that's just a brief tie-in into how the European Enlightenment ties in with the Doctrine of Discovery in global white supremacy. There's been a lot written on how science was tied into this. You could look up terms like drapetomania, which was actually in scientific articles on a condition, a physical disorder that an enslaved person had for wanting to escape enslavement. You can look at phrenology, this debunked racist science of skull measurements tied in with IQ. Then if we're just to look at education and how this took place, you can look at the genocide of the Spanish missions and encomiendas, the boarding schools in North America, that did everything to kill Indigenous culture by banning the speaking and learning of Indigenous language, culture, and outright killings of families and Children.

The oceans of violence produced by Europe, the Doctrine of Discovery and colonialism tie into every facet of life seeking to disrupt connection to land, gender and sexuality, family structures, ways of knowing, language, education, interaction with time by instituting colonial time and putting time zones and borders on time just like the Scramble for Africa put in these borders that were instituted by European power structures. And what they really did is sought to destroy culture. To quote Aime Cesaire, one of the values invented by the bourgeois in former times and launched throughout the world was man. We have seen what has become of that. The other was the Nation. So we're really seeing with this Westphalian term of the Nation State of how these power structures and these monopolies of violence were really put into place. And regarding gender and sexuality, J .K. Lani Kawanui wrote in her book, "Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty," that the Hawaiian kingdom, Pre-Christian, allowed for bisexual and multiple partners. And that Kamenui pointed out that the partial goal of colonialism was patriarchal property of women in putting in this nuclear family and in this whole concept of marriage. And this was also done in North and South America too when you read through the different histories that were laid out. So this is basically just a real quick deep dive on the history of the Doctrine and Discovery just to give a foundation of when we're talking about colonialism, how far back it goes and how far it has and still has.

chris: I want to leave with one final question here: “what language do you speak? And is that language native to the land you're on? And why or why not?

**