Hi Natalie, we read your tweets and want to reply as a collective. This post is as much a response to your public resignation as it is for broader communities reading this.
We are grateful to have been able to work and grow by your side for the past seven years. With your resignation, we lost a valuable founding member and political leader. Your work has been fundamental to defining AAD’s two revolutionary roads: anti-capitalist and anti-colonial.
We are committed to the work of combating white supremacy, both in and outside our own organization. As a mixed Indigenous, POC, and white group, we are always in the process of learning how to use our white abolitionist politics to destroy white power wherever it appears. We developed this approach with your leadership and insights, as an alternative to the dead ends of class reductionism and deferential “ally” politics.
We understand that having to educate non-Natives in the group is frustrating. We must uphold the principle that Indigenous fighters must get more than they give from collaborations with class struggle fighters.
Your post says you don’t trust or respect most AAD members and implies that this has come from the difficulty of working with people focused on class struggle. But that can’t be the whole story because Indigenous and POC members also felt the strain of your distrust.
Your statement overlooks the decolonizing and anti-racist contributions of other Indigenous and POC leaders in AAD, disregarding our work on many frontlines.
We agree that trauma comes from structural oppression, which is why we strive to care for each other in and through collective struggle. Member-support is an ongoing, often messy project for which there is no blueprint, and your feedback will shape our discussions on how to hold space for trauma in our group.
We are proud of the work that we’ve done together, Natalie. AAD will keep fighting capitalism and colonialism in parallel with you, in ways that work for you as a writer, thinker, and fighter.