With Dr. Ruth Green (She/her), Director of the School of Social Work at York University.

Green is an activist turned accidental academic. She identifies as an urban Indigenous person, and is a citizen of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. She is from the Kanien’keha:ka Nation and is a member of the Turtle Clan.

Green likes to think, discuss, and write about Indigenous education. She teaches about the Indigenous resistance to the social issues that the geo-political nation state of Canada has created while also working to address the impacts on Indigenous communities. She is also a PI on DIVERT Mental Health a project to address EDI issues in mental health education through technology. She has a PhD from OISE in Adult Education and Community Development, an MSW and a BSW from X University now known as Toronto Metropolitan University.

Transcript 

00:00:01 Andrea

Hello and welcome to Alright, Now What? I’m your host, Andrea Gunraj, for the Canadian Woman’s Foundation.

Gender equality and justice, where we live, work, learn, and play, is the goal. And it makes life better for everyone. This podcast is our chance to connect with insightful people and explore what it’ll take to get there in Canada.

The work of the Canadian Woman’s Foundation and its partners takes place on traditional First Nations, Métis, and Inuit territories. We are grateful for the opportunity to meet and work on this land. However, we recognize that land acknowledgments are not enough. We need to pursue truth, reconciliation, decolonization, and allyship in an ongoing effort to make right with all our relations.

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00:01:30 Andrea

Today I’m speaking with Dr. Ruth Green, Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at York University.

Alright, Ruth, it is lovely to have you with us today. My first question for you: if you had to say, give yourself a term, gender equality change maker, if you had to frame yourself as that, what kind of change maker would you see yourself as? Give us a sense of who you are.

00:02:05 Ruth

I think if when you say change maker, I want to go to gender reclaimer because I identify as an Indige-queer femme, and for me femme is a political statement on disrupting gaze. But when I say a reclaimer, I also look at the communities that I hold near and dear. And you know, three out of five of my wife’s and my children are nonbinary or Two Spirit people, and my wife identifies as a Two Spirit Knowledge Keeper and Elder. And they use they/them pronouns. I’m the only person in my family, in the house of four, that uses a binary pronoun—other than the cats, of course, because you know as a stereotypical queer family, of course, we have to have tons of cats.

But in that, the concept and construct of binary gender is a colonial concept and is coming from, you know, cis-hetero patriarchy based in white supremacy. And for me, instead of being a change maker, I’d want to be a gender reclaimer—reclaiming peoples and space and place for gender to be expansive and explosive and playful and fun and tied to roles and responsibilities, instead of biology and expectations of scripts.

00:03:29 Andrea

I see that as telling a broader story of what it means to be gendered, however you are gendered or not gendered in anything, anything in that spectrum.

Tell me a bit about just the power of reclamation. I’m quite taken by that.

00:03:48 Ruth

Well, the thing, as I understand a lot of pre-contact Indigenous societies—so I didn’t introduce myself as a Haudenosaunee yakonkwe and I identify as yakonkwe, which means a woman person. And that for me is very comfortable. But I also know that the responsibilities and roles of a Haudenosaunee woman are not what cis-hetero patriarchy would state.

The very fact that one of the pieces of legislation that was created in the early days of this country, called the Indian Act of 1876, was designed because of where the capital cities of the province of Canada, when it was a province or a dominion of Canada, where it was located was right in our territories. And they saw Haudenosaunee woman as a problem. The matriarchy and the matrilineal societies, and how longhouses were the responsibility of women were so damaging to the nation state building that they needed to dismantle, and created infringement laws that would take away Haudenosaunee women’s status, so we didn’t pass down our treaty rights to our children.

The very fact that one of Canada’s primary laws that developed this nation was to disrupt the matriarchy that I belong to—for me, reclaiming and doing that work of, what is gender? What is this binary system? And why do we remove power from those that are life givers?

And a lot of times, that’s how we address parenting roles and responsibilities is, I am the sacred vessel my children chose to come to this world through. I am a life giver. And you know, that’s for me the idea that there is only one way to be a woman or to be a human being in a prescription.

My wife’s culture, they are Cree-Métis from George Gordon—with family from George Gordon First Nation. They actually had multiple words in their own language to identify different ways of being within gender. And they identify as aayahkwew, which means neither man nor woman. Right, if we had these old words, we had different ways of understanding. And for me, when we talk about Indigenous rights, when we talk about Indigenous understandings, it needs to be grounded in responsibilities to our communities. Rights always come with responsibilities and Two Spirit, gender queer, Indige-queer people have always had different responsibilities.

00:07:13 Andrea

Ruth, thank you for sharing and taking us to that place of just grounding us in this understanding of gender as so expansive, and language, language and culture, and of course, lost language, reclaiming those languages again.

00:07:31 Ruth

I never say lost. Lost means that I put it down and I forgot where it was. There is nothing lost in Indigenous culture. Nothing lost in our communities. Those are taken and those are the direct impact of intergenerational racism and the racism that we continue to face.

00:07:55 Andrea

Thank you for clarifying. Love it.

Let me ask you about some deep learnings. What are some core life lessons? And you’re sharing these already, but anything that you would share in addition to what you’ve already shared—core life lessons you bring to grow gender equality and justice today.

00:08:13 Ruth

There’s multiple teachings I love—many, many, many. But one of the—when you said that, two came to my mind immediately so obviously, those are the two I’m supposed to talk about.

I think the first one that came to my mind was about our longest journey as humans. And the longest journey that any—the furthest any of us could ever travel is actually from our heads to our hearts. And for me, that understanding—as an academic, it is expected that I sit in my head. But I know when I travel between my head and my heart, that’s when I actually come as a full person and a person who is not ashamed or has not lost anything; I come with it all.

And when I know I’ve connected from my head to my heart is when I resonate with the fact that I am my ancestor’s best dreams. They fought against a system that wanted to annihilate them so that I could be here. But it also means that when I become an ancestor, I have to be dreaming about somebody else. And so, I also know I am the descendants’ greatest hope. If I don’t do the work every day, if I don’t stand up and be who I am, what are the descendants coming behind me going to see?

And in that comes a second understanding, and it comes from Teachings of the Anishinaabe, which is based—the Anishinaabe Teachings of the Seven Grandparents. And we’re not—we’re supposed to embrace the whole teaching. But for me, I’ve struggled with—I’ve been diagnosed a long, long time ago in my teenage years with high functioning, generalized anxiety disorder. And so, one of the things that I’ve held in really challenging moments when I’m super anxious is the mantra in my head of “it’s not brave unless you’re afraid.” And the very fact that for so many gender-diverse people, women, we are told all the time what we should be afraid of.

But I always want us to think about how brave we are because we’ve been conditioned since, some people get an ultrasound picture or some people assign a sex at birth, we are conditioned to be afraid, and that is not acceptable for me.

I think we all need to be brave. But that bravery comes from standing against the inherent fears that we’ve been taught to embrace.

00:11:20 Andrea

I have so many reactions. My first reaction is I love that you’re framing dreaming as part of the kind of head to heart journey. And I love that you’re speaking to bravery because I think you’re right. As people experience gender injustice, so often we’re told about the things that we don’t do, and we’re so often kind of split from the bravery that we do show every day and share every day. I love that.

I wonder if, I mean you’re clearly a passionate person and it comes out in everything that you’re sharing right now. It comes out in the clear community, love and groundedness that you have. What would you say you’re most passionate about today that connects to gender equality?

00:12:13 Ruth

I really want to find a way for children and youth to understand that their gender expression is beautiful.

As I said, I’m a parent of, you know, I have three, I had three kids pre raised for me, you know they’re adults when they came into my life. But those two that chose to come through me, when my eldest was four, I finally was smart enough to understand what they’d been telling me for the past, for two years before, and that was that they wanted to be raised as a nonbinary person. They were four. So, they’ve used they/them pronouns for most of their life.

They’ve just started high school and about 18 months ago they did one of—something they’re proud of, something that they don’t regret, but something that they are rectifying again. And they cut off for their first time, their hair. So, they had worn their hair, it was to their bum. It was, you know, this long, beautiful brown flowing locks that I braided twice a day. And when they cut off their hair, they started to experience something that they never had before and they were 12 and a half, almost thirteen years old, when they first understood and could comprehend deeply what male privilege was.

When they cut their hair, people assigned them a masculine identity and it threw them through a loop because our society, Canadian society, is so fixated on gender that children actually do not get to experience openness about it. And my child, who had been raised, because that’s how they asked—we did ceremony and that’s how they asked to be raised. And they told me that they had always been Two Spirit and they came from the Spirit world as a Two Spirit. They knew this. But when they were 13 or 12 and a half, 13, and understanding male privilege for the first time, they were so angry. They could not understand why because they had short hair and presented as a male, they were being treated in a way that they could immediately recognize as inequal, you know, and it’s been challenging for them.

They also had a growth spurt at the same time where they grew. They’re now over six feet tall at 14, and so then they experience this safety that they’ve never experienced before. And they can grasp that that safety is because men do not understand the fear that has been instilled in women and gender-diverse people. But they understand it because they’ve experienced that for most of their childhood.

And for me, I’m really passionate about supporting children and youth understanding that gender is a script. That gender is something that is not, like it’s inherent on who they are, and it is put upon them, put upon them instead of allowing them to blossom into the humans that they’re supposed to be. Right? When they’re told this is what girls do, this is what boys do. It does not allow for them to be the whole person that they are. And I would love to see children just be kids.

00:16:06 Andrea

That is so interesting. It is put upon and then internalized and then performed. Imagine if it wasn’t put upon, imagine if it was performed for joy, for connection.

I’m so glad that your child, they saw what happened and came to that place of anger and I don’t like this, and this is not good. This is not cool. I’m not going to accept. I’m not going to see this as normal. I’m not going to see this as right.

I guess my question for you now is: alright, now what? You have these things that you shared with us, what’s a powerful take away that you would leave with our listeners, based on all the things you shared and your expertise, on how we can be better gender equality change makers in our lives.

00:16:54 Ruth

I think it is about—I have a very good friend. Her name’s Nora Loreto. She is absolutely brilliant and when I was pregnant with my eldest, she said something to me that changed how I’ve parented. And she told me, as a white woman, the biggest act of resistance we can do is to raise good people. Raising good people is the biggest act of resistance and I—it hit me. It hit me in such a visceral way.

You know, we talk about our Indigenous communities as experiencing intergenerational trauma, and I really don’t love that, because it always puts the blame back on the families. And it also assumes that I can’t love and gently care for and parent my children. My children still know the impact of racism. My children understand that from a personal perspective. They’ve experienced that in the school system.

I always want people to understand instead of talking about and placing blame on our community for the impacts of intergenerational trauma, let’s put it right where it should be. And let’s talk about the intergenerational impacts of racism, because that’s the privileging of white supremacy, of white bodies, of male bodies, of able bodies, of straight bodies that is so, so damaging to the vast majority. The vast majority of the world are not straight white, able-bodied men. They are the minorities. But how come their voice is the majority voice? And that’s what I would want to know.

I strongly believe in solidarity across groups—that there is no such thing as Black liberation on stolen land and that we need to come together and work together. I believe that the colonial structures that have impacted country—communities that have been, you know, engaged through or created through the doctrine of discovery. You know, when you look at India and African nations and the Middle East—we weren’t people, we were not people.

We know our personhood. But we still have a structure that holds up the smallest number of people: white, straight, able-bodied men. And it’s so problematic. That would be my desire is that we build societies where intersections and where multiple communities come together.

00:19:58 Andrea

Alright, Now What?

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