The first step in organising a protest regarding Indigenous deaths in custody & solidarity action for BLM is to work out who’s land youre on, get in touch with the Indigenous leaders & Elders via formal channels & ensure you’re doing work which supports & uplifts black voices.

If you’re advertising a protesting using key terminology like BLM & saying you’re working to support Indigenous peoples - but you’ve excluded them from the leading - then you’re just performing & reproducing the power dynamics you’re saying you’re protesting.

Excuse the typos, I’m tired & don’t have time for repeated calls for direct personal education whenever yt people decide to perform. A pattern of behaviour being repeated across the continent. We get it, you’re inspired, but ffs educate yourself before trying to talk for us.

I honestly don’t think people realise how as well as dealing with the emotion of these matters when they’re front page, there is this barrage of DMs of people across alllll socials & email asking for personalised hand holding. It forces you off what should be a social space.

If you’re aware of mob with platform - whether it’s TikTok or twitter or YouTube or whatever, they’re not your first point of call. Go to google, work out the land YOU live on, then look for the formal Indigenous orgs & use their formal channels & be patient. There are not enough

of us, even if the workload of answering was spread evenly across all 700,000 of us - there are 23 million of you. We can’t do this one on one. Go read our work, read IndigenousX, contact local formal orgs, do that work so we can do our work asked of us by our family & community

Risk isn’t shared equally. The risk of covid19 is much, much higher for First Nations. The community leaders might say “no” to rallying, they may prefer a different form of solidarity, the point is thats where you START. You listen to them, if they say no, you STOP.