This is an open letter to my Indigenous Community,

I’m asking for solidarity for #BlackLivesMatter. To stop appropriating this hashtag to announce that Indigenous lives are just as important, because we feel the parallel systemic violence on top of colonial land violence.

This is not a time to try and prove who has been hurt worse or more often or for how long. This will not stop the pain and will not bring you comfort. This is a time for #IndigenousSolidarity.

I work on issues related to missing and murdered Indigenous women and have for over a decade. At a time when NOONE was taking us seriously, when our numbers were denied as not “real” statistics. When we called for allyship and solidarity…. We heard many of the same derailment tactics: That white women face domestic violence too, that if we handled ourselves differently, dressed differently, did not struggle with addiction, moved from the res, moved from the city, moved from the neighbourhood, didn’t antagonize the police, the social worker, the border guard, the transit police, the RCMP, then we would be ok. This is a falsehood intended to implicate us in our own oppression.

These are tactics used to take us away from the truth that violence is being done to us in genocidal numbers and we must not use these tactics now to contribute to the derailment of #BlackLivesMatter.

Because #BlackLivesMatter. Period.

We are not just an Indigenous community, but a community that is mixed blood…. Our history, oppression and future and that of the black community are not isolated from one another, nor is our potential for emancipation.

Our communities share ancestors and babies…. We are family. Think of your mixed race brothers and sisters, nieces and nephew, aunties and uncles, our parents and partners. We are community. How many of our youth and artists have found meaning and empowerment through black culture? Through black leaders, through black music?

It’s time we as Indigenous communities support black lives, and not simply take meaning from black culture. We know what it feels like to have our culture appropriated, while the oppression and injustice is omitted. We know what it is to constantly demand to have our lives recognized as human and our deaths to be taken seriously and treated with the gravity they deserve. We need to acknowledge that we know what this is, and to consciously choose to stand in solidarity against this kind of oppression.

Take this moment to examine racism within our own Indigenous communities. How are we complicit? It’s time to decide if we want to have more in common with those that share our oppression, or with our shared oppressors. Racism is not our tradition.

I understand that we are hurting, for so many same reasons: systemic violence resulting in injury, death, public execution, child apprehension and incarceration. But we did not see the hashtag #BlackIdleNoMore did we? No, that would not be ok. That would negate our struggle, that would silence our point, our position, our movement in a weird oppression competition.

So it’s time to stand in solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter.

Right now, in North America, Black lives are being taken in public executions by police and this must stop. It’s insane. Why would we want to derail that?

Here’s what I’m asking you to do:

Hold space for #BlackLivesMatter: to mourn, hurt, be quiet, be angry for all the feelings, for all the words, for all the silences. Stop the appropriation of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. This includes speaking up and against the hashtag alllivesmat@#… #NativeLivesMatt@#… Etc. Interrupt and engage those in your own circles/ workplaces/ social media who dismiss the real pain and resistance efforts of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. This is not a time to be silent. Understand that the violence you may be aware of now, is not new and is symptomatic of colonialism, racism and white privilege and what is new is the collective international resistance to the violence against and public execution of people of color by police. #SayTheirNames Say #BlackLivesMatter

Believe it.

~Jessica Wood