We Build This to Outlast
November 21, 2024
An interview with Dr geran lorraine
Dr. geran lorraine is the associate director of the Center for Ecological Regeneration at Garrett Seminary. Speaking shortly after the election, they reflect on how they’re processing the current moment, the movements that shape their ecological work, and epistemologies that nurture a different relationship with the land. Read a transcript of our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.
Benjamin Perry (BP): Your scholarship focuses on intersections between indigeneity, ecology, and queerness. Where do you situate your own identity in the middle of that work?
geran lorraine (gl): *laughs* Identity is always murky business. Mostly, I situate myself within a long history of involvement in activist circles. I grew up in a rust belt town on traditional Haudenosaunee lands—shaped by rural Appalachia, labor organizers and Native nations. My uncle died from AIDS-related illnesses when I was young, and my mom has been active in healthcare advocacy for people with HIV since I was young, working with doctors who would see HIV/AIDS patient and helping to dispel myths. At a very early age, I grew up with a great-grandfather who was a local labor union president and, when I turned 18, I got involved with the domestic workers union in New York City. I followed that work into what started as the Poverty Initiative and became the Poor People’s Campaign, to Standing Rock, to work as an environmental justice organizer in Virginia, fighting the Atlantic Coast Pipeline with the Freedmen Community in Union Hill. Activism, queerness, and Indigenous ways of knowing have always been circling around my work and have been constant forces pushing me to question the reality we think we know. Especially as someone who is bisexual and nonbinary, I’m always thinking about the in-between worlds, the liminal existences, that are being built, and how I’ve been shaped by the movements who are building them.
BP: There’s something deeply Queer about answering a question about identity with a focus on practice—contesting what it means to even talk about identity in meaningful ways amid broader systems that insist on everything being fixed and definable. And I love how you name fluidity in Indigenous and Queer ways of knowing. Where do you find overlap there?
gl: There’s a mode of thinking about kinship and relationality in Indigenous circles that is also present in Queer circles—a sense that, if kinship is at the root of building resistance, then all our work is relational. We save each other. Obviously, Queer folks are just as diverse as Indigenous folks and there’s no one unified way of thinking. But within that vast diversity, there is a model of, “We are here for each other.” These are communities that have had to outlast laws and policies. For Indigenous peoples that’s a sense of being before and knowing you will be after. For Queer people, it’s not as grounded in terms of place, but there is a similar sense that the people who came before us outlasted. They didn’t always find public ways to thrive, but they built kinship communities, networks of relationship, little pockets of safety and resistance. It’s the ongoing understanding that, for Black and Brown folks, Indigenous folks, Queer folks, and Women, this world is not going to offer what we need to thrive, and that’s why activism is necessary: We build those spaces for ourselves.
BP: Talking about relationality in queerness and indigeneity, one place that immediately comes to mind is the personhood of nonhumans. If we talk about, for example, the personhood of trees, there’s a queering of anthropological hierarchies that many of our theologies are built on. How does acknowledging this call us to a different kind of relationality?
gl: At the core of the Center for Ecological Regeneration is a basic recognition that we do this for the land. The Midwest Bioregional Hub we are working to launch is about the Midwest Bioregion, knowing that the land fundamentally influences our basic work and knowledge systems. It’s why we use “kin” language, it’s why “all my relations” isn’t anthropocentric. Things don’t have value simply because they mean something to humans. So much theology rests on the notion that we do ecological work because we want to save humanity. I’m not minimizing that work—people are important. But it’s a knowledge system that relies heavily on not recognizing the inherent value of the more-than-human world, value that doesn’t come from humans’ relationship to it. Whether we want to recognize it or not, that value is already there in the land, influencing our lives, our desires, our food ways. When we talk about embracing Indigenous ways of knowing, it’s not just Indigenous methodologies—it’s reality. At their core, these Indigenous ways of knowing are observational. It’s just what the world is doing, maintaining balance. This is what we’re given, what we have, but we don’t have control over it. We are in relationship with it.
BP: Why is there such deep-seated resistance toward allowing theological anthropology to be queered in those kinds of ways?
gl: The easiest scapegoat is to blame colonialism and colonialist thought. I’m not denying that, but I think it’s an easy systemic answer. And the problem with systemic answers is they’re paralyzing, they place action in the realm of argumentative thought, debate, opinions. And yet, I also want to name that it’s hard to recognize something you haven’t named as human as a being—it’s not simple work. And not just trees—trees for me is the beginning. They look like people, right? Like they have arms and beautiful curly hair. We can begin with trees, but there’s harder things to think about as kin—how do you think about a lichen or a moss as a being? Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer had a talk where she invited theologians to rethink their rituals, and this is where I really want to invite theological education to change. We need to rethink rituals of beingness, because it keeps reinforcing the idea that only humans are beings.
BP: So how can Indigenous ways of knowing bring us closer to the truth about who God is calling us to become?
gl: As an ethicist, I would say “truths.” Indigenous ways of knowing are going to keep asking you what truths you know, why you know them, and how they came to you. And did they come to you from the place you live in? Especially in ecological work, it’s a question of how we can engage with difference in ways that aren’t destructive and oppressive. Because the world has its own agency. This place, the one you’re in; the grasses you walk on, the rivers, the lake beds—these places matter. They’ve always mattered. They don’t matter because you want them to, they just do and they will. As we think about communities of outlasting, they will outlast you. The land will continue. This principle of outlasting doesn’t just derive from human communities, it’s something we learn from what nature has always done. Humans are important, but we are also reliant upon the land to survive. We don’t survive without this place, but it survives without us. So the question becomes, “What can you do right now for your own locality? For the land where you live?”
BP: It feels resonant that you invoked the history of ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and AIDS activism in your opening thoughts. The parallels between people who engaged in political work even as they tended and loved people who were dying, or approached death themselves—that embodied tension feels alive in this climate moment. How does that sit for you?
gl: ACT-UP is incredibly relevant here, because it also asks how we can resist nihilism, even if we knew that we were dying. I think of the poetry of folks like Craig G. Harris. “How do you live with an energy that ignites and irritates, burns and bubbles, soothes and inspires?” he says. Many of those organizers knew that there wasn’t something coming to save them yet still found inspiration in a moment where they could have been overwhelmed. Their answer wasn’t to wallow and be sad. It was, “Carry my body and put it on the steps. Let them see what they have done.” That’s deeply theological, and it’s the work we can do right now. Let them see what they are doing. Speak plainly, because what’s at stake is death. And if what’s at stake is death then, as Audre Lorde says, “go out like a fucking meteor.” Build communities that outlast even if you’re not part of the outlasting. All these circles, that’s what they teach you. It’s what Indigenous ways of knowing teaches you. It’s what Queer theology teaches you. It’s what Black and Brown folk teach you, what ballrooms teach you. They teach you ways to outlast.