The Way Forward Emerging Strategies For 
Crime Victims Of Color: Shaping the Future of 
Protective Structures 

JACKI CHERNICOFF: Good afternoon, or good morning, everyone, 
depending on where you're joining us from today. Thank you for 
joining our virtual session, The Way Forward: Emerging 
Strategies for Crime Victims of Color, Shaping the Future of 
Protective Structures. For those of you who have joined us 
before, welcome back. And for those of you who are joining us for 
the first time, we're really glad that you're here. 

My name is Jacki Chernicoff with the Center on Victimization and 
Safety at the Vera Institute of Justice and the National Resource 
Center for Reaching Victims. 

With that, I want to turn things over to Zoe Flowers, who will 
introduce herself and the panelists for today's discussion. Thanks 
again for joining us. 

ZOE FLOWERS: Thank you, Jacki. This is Zoe Flowers. And I first 
want to thank everyone for joining the call today, for participating 
with me in the chat already. We are very much looking forward to 
an interactive and exciting conversation. So let me go ahead and 
introduce the folks that you will be hearing from today, all right? 


So let's see here. All right. So first I want to introduce Purvi 
Shah. Some of you all may remember Purvi from the webinar we 
did, I think it was two weeks ago now, and she is a writer and 
social justice advocate. While serving as the Executive Director of 
Sakhi for South Asian Women she won the inaugural SONY South 
Asian Excellence Award for social service. In 2017, through a 
participatory change process, she authored a year-long study, 
Seeding Generations, and you will be able to have access to that 
resource in the chat later on in the call. 

So that work spurred New York City community-based 
interventions for people who cause harm and abuse. She is also 
the author of two books. One is called Terrain Tracks and the 
other is called Miracle Marks. I have both of those books. They 
are wonderful. I will also drop those in the chat so that you can 
pick those up. And during the 10th anniversary of 9/11, she 
directed Together We Are New York, a community-based poetry 
project to highlight Asian-American voices. 

Her favorite art practices are her sparkly eye shadow, which I am 
wearing today in honor of Purvi, as I always do when we train 
together, and her raucous laughter and seeking justice. So if 
anyone wants to find out more about Purvi, which I'm sure you 
will after this call, you can follow her on @purvipoets. 

So the next person up is Annika Leonard. Wherever Annika feels 
called to create spaces where deep healing can occur, particularly 


in the lives of Black women, femmes, girls, and youth, so that is 
where you will find Annika. On a national level, Annika has 
participated in the ACE-DV Leadership Forum of the National 
Resource Center on Domestic Violence and has been consulted 
with the National Resource Center on Sexual Violence under 
several projects, including the 2018 SART protocol and the Sexual 
Assault Demonstration Initiative project. 

Annika has served as the chair of the Milwaukee Commission on 
Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, where her organization, 
Priceless Unite LLC, operates as a sexual assault service provider 
in the city of Milwaukee. Annika has a Bachelor of Science in 
Human Services and a Master's of Business Administration from 
Cardinal Stritch University. Her continued studies and 15 plus 
experience honoring and holding space for people most impacted 
by violence allow her to present offerings in the form of 
workshops, keynotes, and guiding us to be in alignment with our 
truth through her organization Priceless Unite. Annika has 
developed a unique, culturally specific curriculum for Black youth 
that cultivates their self-awareness, leadership, and wellness to 
bring about deep radical and cultural solutions to ending violence. 

Next up we have Lorienne Castelle. Lorienne is the Director of 
Prevention at the New York State Coalition Against Domestic 
Violence. Lorienne has been an advocate and activist working to 
address gender-based violence for over two decades. She joined 


the team at the New York State Coalition in 1998 and split her 
time between the coalition and the Pennsylvania Coalition from 
2011 through 2013. And Lorienne did that in order to launch a 
prevention initiative in Pennsylvania. 

So sorry. There's some noise going on outside my window. I hope 
it's not too disruptive. 

Miss Castelle has the honor of working with several national 
organizations across the US, including a Train the Trainer 
consultant for the National Center on Domestic Violence, Trauma, 
and Mental Health. She is a trainer and consultant to Major 
League Baseball Intimate Partner Violence Prevention Council, 
which was convened by the National Resource Center on 
Domestic Violence. And she worked to create an online resource 
called Prevent IPV: Tools for Social Change. 

As the director of the New York Coalition and former principal 
investigator for a statewide prevention project with the Centers 
for Disease Control for over a decade, she is responsible for 
promoting best practices for preventing and responding to 
domestic violence. And that is Lorienne. So you all are definitely 
in for a treat. 

And our certainly last, but not least, panelist is Maria Del Rosario 
Franco-Rahman. And she envisions a loving, harmonious world 
where healing and liberation resound and we all thrive. And when 


you hear Maria, when you hear her lovely voice, you are 
definitely going to get it. That is definitely what she embodies. 

Maria is the Founder and CEO of Con Todo Corazon, where she 
works locally and nationally offering heart-centered holistic 
healing services designed to support personal and social 
transformation. Her work centers the healing and liberation of 
women of color survivors, advocates, and service providers and 
our fellow communities on the margins. 

Her 15 years of service to survivors of gender-based violence 
includes direct services to undocumented domestic violence 
survivors at a Latinx culturally-specific transitional shelter, 
offering holistic healing retreats to survivors and service 
providers, and she currently serves as a consultant for the 
Women of Color Network, and teaching artists with Critical Mass 
Dance Company. Maria is a Xicana moving through the world, 
honoring her ancestors and the coming generations con todo 
corazon. 

And I am your gracious host for this conversation, and my name 
is Zoe Flowers. And I am also a consultant with the Women of 
Color Network. I have been working in the field of domestic and 
sexual violence for 20 years, and all of my information will be in 
the chat, and so I'm going to start this conversation. 


We felt like we wanted to do this series because we wanted to 
raise different issues, keeping in mind what is happening globally 
and what is happening here nationally. We wanted to present a 
series of conversations to you all. 

So I'm not going to talk anymore I am going to ask Annika to 
answer this first question. And this question is how does our 
ancestral wisdom inform the way we think about protective 
structures today? So again, the question is how does our 
ancestral wisdom inform the way we think about protective 
structures today? So Annika, please go ahead and take it over. 

ANNIKA LEONARD: OK. Hi, everyone. My name is Annika 
Leonard, as Zoe has stated. And I would like to just begin with 
lighting a candle. And this candle is being lit for every person who 
has experienced violence, whether they are in the United States 
or elsewhere. And this is violence that institutional. It's violence 
that is systemic. It's violence that's in our households. 

And so I light this candle on behalf of those who can no longer 
speak for themselves, and for those of us who are still out here 
advocating and raising up their experiences. So I felt called to do 
that. And if you have a minute, just take a minute and just digest 
that, and then also say a prayer of your own. 

And so when the question is raised around protective structures, I 
think that many people think of protective structures as places 


like hospitals, schools, the justice system, things of that nature. 
And I think that a lot of communities of color do not see those 
institutions as protective. Those very institutions has a history of 
causing harm within our communities. And so when I think of 
protective structures, I think of people in my neighborhood. I 
think of people who have offered nontraditional services and just 
on the spot services in times of crisis to people who they've never 
encountered before, just strangers on the streets. 

So one of the things that I wanted to kind of point out is that 
many of the institutions have been harmful to marginalized 
communities, and they also have not been accessible to a number 
of our community members as well. 

ZOE FLOWERS: Thank you so much for that opening, for lighting 
the candle, and for what you have already shared. We are going 
to pause for a moment so that we can switch interpreters. 

ANNIKA LEONARD: This is Annika. And I am just listing off some 
of the ways that marginalized communities have not been 
protected in what we call protective structures. And so in having 
lived experiences shared with me from my siblings who are 
gender nonconforming and transgendered, and pretty much 
every community on the gender spectrum that is not straight and 
heterosexual, have been impacted by being rendered invisible 
through intake forms, through mis-gendering, and things of that 
nature. 


I'll focus today on two things in particular. One is the institution 
of health care and the other is the institution of criminal justice, 
and a number of ways that communities of color, particularly, 
have been harmed by the medical profession. It comes when we 
are not informed and cannot give consent to some of the things 
that happened to us while we were seeking services from these 
institutions. 

So a couple of things that I would like to add are experiments 
that have been done on Black women in terms of when Black 
women were enslaved in this country. And the father, air quotes, 
of modern day medicine did horrific experiments on African-
American women and African women who were slaves, and said 
that basically, they did not need any sort of anesthesia because it 
was too much trouble to go through and it wasn't worth it. And so 
we have the person who is known for creating the spectrum that 
we are used to have vaginal exams experimenting, and that 
spectrum is only here because of the pain that Black women 
endured. 

We also have examples in which Indigenous tribes were 
intentionally infected with smallpox. We have situations where 
the Tuskegee experiments were taking place over the span of 40 
years. Black men in Alabama were intentionally given syphilis just 
so that the medical profession could then see what the long-term 


impact of syphilis was. They had no idea. They could not give 
informed consent to have this done to them. 

When we think about our sisters in Puerto Rico, and also within 
the North America, we see a lot of forced sterilization. And 
actually, it's within our Indigenous First Nations communities, 
Black communities, and also, like I said, actually all communities 
where women and people who give birth have been experimented 
on and given birth control, which then had adverse effects on 
them, and they had no recourse on this. 

And what we've seen is we've seen and we've heard about a 
number of these instances. A lot of us just have a feeling in our 
gut like, no, I don't want to go to the hospital because we 
remember in our DNA how we have been treated at hospitals. We 
think about what's happening with COVID, and a lot of 
communities of color, they don't trust what the government is 
saying, and therefore, there's more harm being done. 

And the harm being done is that we are not being-- well, let me 
reframe that. We are told that we quarantine. We are told that 
there are a lot of things that we need to do in order to stay safe. 
But we're told all of these things from a government that has 
intentionally harmed us over and over again. And so those are 
some of the things that I wanted to mention in terms of 
protective structures that are not so protective when it comes to 
certain communities. 


And so one thing that I will end with, the author of Medical 
Apartheid, Harriet Washington, quoted in her book that people 
tend to underestimate the extent and the breadth of this. 
Washington says, "There is no sphere of American medicine that 
has not been touched by the use of research of African-
Americans." so I wanted to just add that quote and then describe 
the picture that you all see before you. 

This picture is from my womb ceremony, my womb healing 
ceremony. In the picture, you'll see the legs of chairs, which are 
positioned in a circular pattern. On one end of the table, you'll 
see the tip of a Black shoe and gray pants legs of a person who 
joined me in the ceremony. There is a rectangular table with a 
teal tablecloth sitting on top of a purple carpet. On the far end of 
the table there are eucalyptus leaves between a white candle and 
a wood-carved hand uplifting the egg. 

ZOE FLOWERS: Annika, I'm sorry. This is Zoe. Hang on one 
second, please. We just want to make sure that this is accessible 
to everyone, this photo. I am sharing a photo. So I actually 
stopped sharing the photo, Annika. So can you go ahead and just 
talk about the photo and why you used it because I want to make 
sure that there are no captions on this PowerPoint so that it is 
accessible. 

ANNIKA LEONARD: OK. So should I continue, or should I start 
over? 


ZOE FLOWERS: Yes. No, you can talk about the intention of the 
altar and why you all are doing it in that way. 

ANNIKA LEONARD: OK. So the image is of an altar, and this also 
was a part of a womb ceremony. I have experienced a lot of anti-
Blackness in terms of my reproductive health. And in 2018, I was 
told that I needed to have a hysterectomy. And I had a hard time 
accepting the fact that I needed to have a hysterectomy at such a 
young age knowing that the only reason I had to have this 
hysterectomy is because of anti-Blackness in the medical 
community. 

A group of my sisters got together, and we celebrated my womb, 
and they aided me in helping to release it. And this picture, to 
me, is the epitome of a protective structure. This picture brought 
everything, the ancestral wisdom, the knowledge that was shared 
with me during my time where I needed great healing to happen. 
The picture represents so many aspects of who I am and who I 
have yet to become. I shared this picture because I'm very 
grateful that there are people who still practice our cultural ways 
of healing. 

ZOE FLOWERS: Thank you so much. This is Zoe, and I just want 
to give people one last look at the photo. And maybe we will 
circle around again at the end so that they can see what you 
were talking about. I did drop it into a Word document so you all 


can see it. So when the protective structures do not protect us, 
we create our own. So thank you, Annika. 

I'm going to turn it over to Purvi now. And Purvi, just so you 
know, I'm going to put your picture in a Word doc as well so that 
those captions won't come up and get confusing. So the question 
is, how does our ancestral wisdom inform the way we think about 
protective structures today? 

PURVI SHAH: Thank you, Zoe. And thank you, Annika, for 
bringing us in with light and also the circle of embodied wisdom. 
And I think-- as I was listening to you, I thought about, again, 
this concept of sisterhood, and of course, sister in also a non-
binary construct, which is what does it mean to give support? 
What does it mean to have accompaniment? What does it mean 
to have a peer support group as opposed to, say, a western 
therapeutic or even punitive model? And so what does it actually 
mean to heal on our own terms? 

And when I think of Sakhi for South Asian Women, which is 
where I began a lot of my work around intimate violence, this is 
so connected to the name because sakhi means woman friend in 
a number of South Asian languages. And so I really go back to 
the question of what does it mean to be a friend? What does it 
mean to offer support? And I think, Annika, your story really just 
brought that into focus in a very concrete way. 


When I also think about the work in our field, I think about the 
Minnesota Indian Women's Resource Center and their 
terminology, as with other Indigenous communities, of using the 
term relative. So instead of saying that we're working with these 
clients or with survivors, they are talking about the way in which 
they're working with their relatives. And to also acknowledge 
again that part of the protection and support that they're offering 
is in the context of trauma from colonialism, trauma from 
colonization, trauma from the various kinds of violences that have 
been experienced. 

So one of the speakers that we had had at our Women of Color 
Network Economic Policy and Leadership convenings was Linda 
EagleSpeaker, who was the elder in residence at the time at the 
Minnesota Indian Women's Resource Center. And she said, as 
Native Americans, we heal in ceremony. We must value our 
spirits. 

And so when we think about protective structures in our work, it 
makes me also think of, again, this soul level, this spirit level, this 
way in which how do we actually heal history? How do we heal 
the generations before and the descendants that are to come? 
How do we see ourselves as ancestors? 

I also think-- and Annika really laid out in terms of reproductive 
justice-- it made me think of the work of Sister Song and their 
definition that reproductive justice is the human right to maintain 


personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and 
parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. 
And what I think is really highlighted there is this idea that we 
are not individuals only, but we are in community. 

And so that makes me lead into the picture that I had selected for 
this conversation, which is about confronting violence at a 
community level. So the picture that I put is from the 
photographer Fariba Alam, who helped document some of our 
work at Sakhi during our 15th anniversary. And then we made a 
short film of that, and that film is called What Creates Change, 
and I can drop a link to that film in just a few minutes. 

ZOE FLOWERS: Purvi, this is Zoe. Hang on one second. I'm going 
to pull up the photo, and as I do, that we are going to switch 
interpreters. 

Thank you, Purvi, and. Thank you to everyone for your patience. 
Please go on. 

PURVI SHAH: Thank you, Zoe. So this picture is from a 
community parade. And at Sakhi we used to participate, when we 
were allowed to, in the India Day Parade, the Pakistan Day 
Parade, various community events, because we understood that 
the community was the solution to ending violence. And Sakhi 
actually emerged, as many organizations in our communities 
have emerged, because we knew that mainstream responses, i.e. 


just shelter or just leaving someone, did not necessarily fit our 
families, our communities, even what legal options were available 
as, perhaps, immigrants or folks who may not have access their 
own financial resources, and so we knew we needed other 
options. 

And in this picture, we see some volunteers in front of a sign that 
says, we will not tolerate abuse. And when we first began 
participating in marches and doing marches and rallies, a lot of 
community members didn't know what to do. And there were a 
number of folks who also said, oh, there's no abuse in our 
community. There was a lot of denial. 

And we persisted, and eventually, during my 15 years time at 
Sakhi, what we saw is that towards the end of my tenure, there 
were not only more people calling, but we also had more folks 
who identified as men calling on behalf of women in their lives. 
And they were calling for their sisters, their aunts, their nieces, 
and sometimes they were also calling for violence they 
themselves were experiencing. 

And so I think, for me, that is a success story because it shows 
how when you work with communities, you can also create a 
network of support where the actual abuse is not tolerated. Yes, 
it's important to have services. Yes, it's important to have 
protective structures. But ultimately, we live and are part of 


communities. And we need to be able to sustain our communities 
in order to actually have a generation where there is no violence. 

ZOE FLOWERS: Thank you so much for that. And so we definitely 
want this to be an interactive conversation. This is Zoe, your 
host. And so please, if you haven't already, go ahead and put 
your questions, your comments in the chat. 

So Mariel de La Cruz has a question about the recording. So you 
will be able to get the full recording of this on the Vera website. 
And Purvi is also putting resources in the chat. And so yeah, you 
can access all of these webinars then. 

So I'm going to turn it over to Lorienne. De nada. 

LORIENNE CASTELLE: Here I am. 

ZOE FLOWERS: Great. Fantastic. So Lorienne, how does our 
ancestral wisdom inform the way we think about protective 
structures today? 

LORIENNE CASTELLE: Well, thank you so much for the question, 
and thank you for including me in this conversation. I'm honored, 
and I'm really humbled to be a part of it. And I always want to be 
the last to pipe in when it comes to this. But I have been thinking 
a lot about protective structures, and protective structures are 
not so protective. 


And so one of the things that I was thinking about, and Purvi, you 
and I are really simpatico when it comes to thinking about the 
Indigenous wisdom that has been so graciously offered to folks 
that are honored to be considered aspiring white allies. And I've 
been thinking a lot about how we communicate. 

Well, Zoe, you and I have talked a lot about how white folks don't 
always think about their ancestors. We're not always channeling 
them. We think about history and we think about rituals and we 
think about tradition, but we don't think about the messages from 
our ancestors, necessarily, that we're getting. And so it's really 
easy for white folks to sort of adopt and co-opt, quite frankly, 
other folks' feelings about ancestors. 

But I've been thinking a lot about the domestic violence, the 
grandmothers of the movement, as we call it, and how folks like 
me who've been doing this work for two or three decades think 
about how we were raised up by these badass, fierce sort of 
feminist leaders-- definitely, not just sort of feminist leaders-- 
who have really left a legacy that we're still operating in, thinking 
about this domestic violence and sexual assault mental health 
health care system that we have considered a protective 
structure for all of this time that we're now learning, and maybe 
have known for a long, long time, that they're not quite so 
protective. 


And I feel like my role and my obligation is to talk about and to 
challenge that if we are survivor-centered, if we are trauma 
informed, that we need really to be thinking about, in terms of 
mainstream structures-- domestic violence, sexual assault, crime 
victims in general-- then we need to lean on these values that we 
profess every day, values and principles around being survivor-
centered and being trauma informed. 

We're not really thinking about collective trauma and generational 
trauma and community level trauma and how that impacts the 
folks that come to us for help the way we need to be. And so I 
think about not all interventions working for all survivors, how 
we're not increasing safety, that we're not addressing trauma, 
perhaps, in the way that we think that we are, that we're not 
negating harm unless we're really thinking about the systems and 
the structures that we are connecting survivors to who have a 
lived experience where those systems and the culture, these 
protective structures that we think that we've created, are not 
trusted by Black Indigenous people of color, including the child 
welfare system, including police, and including the criminal justice 
system. 

So for me, thinking about-- and I know that this is a little off from 
thinking about ancestry-- but when I think about the lessons, the 
expectations of the kind of system that we've put together, I 


think about the accountability to the foremothers of this 
movement. 

ZOE FLOWERS: Lorienne? This is Zoe. Let me just interrupt you 
for one minute so that we can switch the interpreters. Don't lose 
that thought. 

LORIENNE CASTELLE: Clearly I was not looking at the chat box 
when the alert came through that I needed to pause. 

ZOE FLOWERS: It's fine. This is Zoe. Please go ahead. 

LORIENNE CASTELLE: Yes. So thank you very much. And so I'm 
thinking a lot about what is justice and what is healing, and how 
to connect people to those kind of spaces for healing that connect 
to what the speakers that came before me, all these amazing 
speakers that came before me, have talked about, which Purvi, 
you invoked the concept of sisterhood and being in community. 

We're talking about, all over the crime victims movement, what 
accountability looks like, particularly in the domestic violence 
movement. We're talking about what justice looks like when 
carceral feminism, which is what the whole domestic violence and 
sexual assault movement is premised on, is undermining safety, 
undermining justice, and undermining healing for people of color. 
What are we to do with that? And so I am sitting with that right 
now in terms of the question, Zoe, that you posed. 


ZOE FLOWERS: Thank you for that. This is Zoe. And when the 
question is what ancestral wisdom do we lean on? And so for you 
as a white aspiring ally, to say-- and I don't want to paraphrase 
your thinking about it-- would that be correct? Are you parsing 
out what maybe should be held on to and what should be thrown 
away? 

LORIENNE CASTELLE: And thank you for using the term white 
aspiring ally because it is aspiring, right? And I resonate with that 
term both personally all of my life, but also professionally in 
terms of the conversations that need to be had that are 
sometimes challenging and difficult, and what it means to be 
doing this work in a way that is truly inclusive and informed and 
responsive to the current situation in the United States of 
America. 

So we know-- and I want to wrap up because I really want to 
defer to the other speakers and play just a supporting role here-- 
but when we only offer connecting survivors to the police, or to 
coming into shelter when they don't want to leave their 
community or their family or their friends, their network, when 
the criminal justice system is the only answer that we have to 
survivors who have been abused, brutalized, coerced, controlled 
by their intimate partners-- when we only do that, when we can't 
think about all of the other things that we might be connecting 


folks to, then we can't say that we're survivor-centered and 
trauma informed. 

And so that means being in conversation with all survivors about 
what would work for them, what would connect them to safety 
and healing. And I think that's why I'm so honored to have been 
invited to participate in this conversation because I think it's 
revolutionary. And it offers us an opportunity at this really, really, 
really critical time to rethink how it is that we do business, along 
with the fact that we need to think about nonprofit industrial-- all 
of that, the industrial complex, and the way funding looks, and 
the way this protective structure that we've created looks. 

It's a system. It's a system that we're connected to and that we 
all promote, that we promote in order to keep our jobs and in 
order to keep our organizations open. And so there's a whole 
other conversation there around how the funding looks and what 
our goals and our outcomes look like that have to be rethought as 
well. 

ZOE FLOWERS: Thank you. Thank you. This is Zoe. And so we 
are going to turn this question over to Maria so we can hear her 
response about the ancestral wisdom. And then we will circle 
back around to the anti-Blackness that Annika raised. And 
Annika, I can join you in that conversation if you'd like because I 
have the exact same experience. But for now, we are going to 
turn it over to Maria. 


So Maria, how does our ancestral wisdom inform the way we 
think about protective structures today, especially in the current 
climate? 

MARIA DEL ROSARIO FRANCO-RAHMAN: Hi. This is Maria, and I 
am in presence with all of you today from Los Angeles, California. 
And I'd like to take a moment to honor the original people of this 
land, the Chumash and the Tongva. And if you are called, if you 
know the names of the original peoples of the land from where 
you're calling today, I invite you to include those names in the 
chat box. 

And so listening to all those who came before me on this call, and 
having sat with the question in preparation for today, more 
questions have emerged, and particularly funding. Lorienne was 
just speaking to that. I've been sitting with and wondering what 
are our established modalities? What is our standard practice of 
care in regards to healing, in regards to who gets the dollars, who 
gets the coin? 

And in my experience, it is those modalities, it is those practices 
of care that have a high volume of empirical evidence behind it. 
And Annika spoke to, early on, what has it meant for our 
community to build this empirical evidence. And so if we start to 
connect all of our conversations, and the experiences of harm, 
and what is actually being lifted up and held as established 
modalities right now as we're of service in this work that we're all 


engaged in, there's a lot to sort of parse out, and there's a lot to 
have an opportunity to examine, again, at this critical moment in 
time in our country, where so many of us are asking, what are 
the foundations? What are the roots? What is the history? 

In terms of history, in terms of ancestral care and wisdom, what 
comes to mind and what comes forward in regard to protective 
structures is the concept of oneness in various spiritual traditions 
from across the world. For my people, for my lineage, the Michika 
people, I think of some of our original ancestors, the Mayan 
people. And there's a term called In Lak'ech, mi otro yo-- the 
other me. 

And it's a sacred greeting, and it is a way to recognize, similar to 
the phrase that Purvi shared from our Indigenous brothers and 
sisters and siblings here that evokes that notion of we're all 
connected. We are all relatives. And so you can see from across 
traditions, again, this concept. Perhaps in Asia, we know it as chi 
or chi, this animating force, this universal force that lives outside 
of us and within us and is something that brings life to all of us. 
And I'll return to that concept later on when we visit an image, an 
illustration that really, also, we've been our natural world and 
paying respect to all forms of life. 

And so with that concept of oneness, I also want to name-- 
what's the term? Is a spiritual bypassing? Spiritual bypassing 
because as someone who has practiced in some spaces of 


meditation and yoga, from non-culturally specific spaces 
sometimes early on, and what really encouraged me to seek out 
spaces where other Black, Indigenous, and people of color were 
centered, was that sometimes we're met with this concept of 
folks embedding their violence on the situation and having it pass 
as spirituality. 

There's this great talk, and I'll share. It comes to us from the 
Liberation app. It's an app designed specifically for Black 
Indigenous people of color to meditate. And for those non-Black 
Indigenous people of color who are interested, they do have a 
fund to make this app accessible to more folks. And it's a talk 
called The Dharma of Black Life. And in that talk, the person-- 
and I'm unable to remember their name, so I'll share that as well 
later on-- talked about that, talks about the spiritual bypassing 
and offers that definition to us about us as people who sometimes 
collect spiritual practices. We want to say, oh, right now we're 
going to meditate, and we're all one, and therefore your lived 
experience, your social reality, we're just going to you check that 
at the door. And so how actually, that's a form of violence. 

And so I just want us to be aware of that as well, that when we 
think about the original concept-- and there's, again, a plentitude 
of definitions and variations about this concept across tradition-- 
it is about this energetic spiritual oneness. And then also, we 
understand that because of our lived experiences, because of the 


structures and institutions and systems that are in place, there is 
not a lived oneness. So I just wanted to name that. 

Perhaps we can go to the image, and then I can circle back on 
some more pieces. 

ZOE FLOWERS: OK. So this is Zoe, and I have pulled up the 
image. 

MARIA DEL ROSARIO FRANCO-RAHMAN: And so this illustration 
comes to us from Molly Costello, and you can find their work on 
social media. I believe they have an Etsy page. They may have a 
website. And it's entitled Celebrate the Animacy of all Beings. And 
the beings that we see here are some beautiful flowers emerging 
from-- it looks like a bark. And we have some mushrooms, and 
we have spider webs, and the moon is in the background. We 
have butterflies, and they serve as symbols of transformation and 
various forms of being, as they once were caterpillars. 

And so I see the plant world, I see this piece of our oneness, as 
great teachers. Some folks refer to them as plant allies, and how 
they can teach us about ourselves, how they can teach us about 
ways that we, as humans, can also learn to work and collaborate 
with one another. 

Adrienne Maree Brown talks a lot about biomimicry and emergent 
strategy, which I highly recommend. And biomimicry is that 


notion where we take note of what is happening in the natural 
world, and can we learn from mycelium and the way that it grows 
in terms of our shared practices of leadership, in terms of how we 
organize, in terms of how we show up in service to others. 

So I look at this image, and I call back the image of Annika's 
share as well, with the plants that were there that are naturally a 
part of so many of our ancestral healing practices, so many of 
them that come together for us from community and are 
available. And it's really an opportunity for us to reconnect to 
those places that perhaps, nature reminds us, there weren't 
always established modalities, these sort of prominent ones that 
are lifted up here in the US. They were these structures that, 
when we pull back development, when we pull back everything 
that has happened across the 100 odd years that the US has 
been here, what was here first? And how can we turn to those 
ancestors? Our plants, our elements, they were here before us, 
and so they serve as our ancestors as well. 

ZOE FLOWERS: Thank you. This is Zoe. And let's just go ahead 
and give the interpreters a chance to pause. I'm going to take the 
picture down, and then, Purvi, you will be up. 

OK. So before, Purvi, I turn this second question over to you, we 
did get a question from Ana, and it looks like you answered some 
of it in the chat. I want to read this question. And Purvi, if you 


wouldn't mind giving your thoughts on it before we go to that 
second question. 

So the question is, what do you say to people who are worried 
about losing culture when they are confronted with finding the 
oneness in different cultures? And Maria, maybe, also, if you want 
to put a response in the chat, Annika, Lorienne, you all are 
welcome to do that as well. But Purvi, I would love to hear from 
you. 

PURVI SHAH: Thank you, Zoe. So this is Purvi. And I think culture 
is ever changing. Culture is tradition, ritual, all of these things 
that are a part of the fabric of our lives. And we know that rituals 
change. Again, Annika began with a ritual that was created, but 
that had deep meaning and connected to ancestral wisdoms. 

So I think when I hear people talking about losing culture, I really 
wonder are they actually worried about losing power, particularly 
understanding that culture changes and that there is no one thing 
that is culture. We know that even in our communities-- like I'm 
an immigrant from India, and India is full of so many different 
cultures. And you can't just say that there is one of any one 
thing. So that's what I think about is in terms of is it about losing 
power? 

And I think there's something here, too, to also name, which is, 
at this moment particularly in the United States, when we have 


all of these conversations about southern culture and statues to 
Confederate soldiers and that kind of thing that we're just trying 
to keep on to tradition when that is clearly something that's 
about violence. 

So it's really about celebrating violence, and we need to really be 
able to name that and say that there is a lot more to southern 
culture. When we think of southern culture, are we thinking New 
Orleans jazz? Or are we thinking, again, of these monuments? So 
we can choose what cultures we're thinking about. 

Similarly, at this moment in time, we have, again, resurgence of 
xenophobia, both in feeling and in legal practice. And that 
particularly affects survivors who are attempting to get gender-
based asylum, to immigrant survivors who might be detained at 
this point in time and not be able to access resources that had 
been put into place earlier. So folks like the [INAUDIBLE] Justice 
Center and the Heartland Alliance have been definitely looking at 
these issues. 

And ultimately, again, when we look at the lens of power, it 
makes me think of who gets to belong and who gets to be 
protected, which, again, circles back to Annnika's comments 
around anti-Blackness. And I wanted to make sure, also, that she 
had a chance to speak because I know there was a question 
deliberately for her as well. 


ZOE FLOWERS: Absolutely. Absolutely. So Annika, will you go 
ahead and respond to that question that was how was anti-
Blackness rooted in the conversation about the hysterectomy, 
from your perspective? 

ANNIKA LEONARD: Yeah. So I will just start at 2018, even though 
the way that I was treated by the medical community is also 
rooted in some ancestral stuff as well. 

So in 2018, I began to have pains, which were familiar to me 
from a little while back being diagnosed with endometriosis. But 
before the diagnosis, I suffered a lot of pain. I was always tested 
for STDs and was not believed when I went to the hospital and 
said, hey, I'm in pain. 

And so in my early 20s, I had a partial hysterectomy. And that 
only came about because I was very insistent that something was 
wrong with me and something was going on and I needed help. 
And so fast forward to 2018. There were similar pains. I'm like, 
oh, no, it's back, and if anybody is familiar with endometriosis, 
you know that it is just a beast amongst itself. 

And so my doctor did not treat me with kindness. She did not 
treat me with the dignity that I desired. I happened to have a 
friend who was treated by the same doctor, and she was treated 
completely differently for the pain that she experienced in her 
abdomen. And plus I just had the feeling. I didn't even need my 


friends to validate that what this doctor was doing was not OK 
and was directly because I am a Black woman, and not just 
another woman of color. 

And so she was very dismissive. She was very just not paying 
attention to my needs and was not giving me an opportunity to 
take an active role in my health care, in my health recovery. And 
so from July until October, I was not treated by any medical 
professional because I could not find a doctor. And by the time of 
October of 2018, I was diagnosed with not only endometriosis, 
but also pelvic floor dysfunction, adenomyosis. 

What else is it? It's another one. Hold on. Oh, yeah, and painful 
bladder syndrome. So I had four conditions that were all full of 
chronic pain, chronic fatigue. I could barely walk. I could barely 
do anything. And all of that, it got that bad because the doctor 
that I had could not see my humanity. So that's how it was 
connected to anti-Blackness. 

ZOE FLOWERS: Thank you so much, Annika. And I definitely had 
the same experiences. I mean, not exactly, but very closely 
female issues. And I went through about four doctors until I 
found a Black woman that I trusted. But every single doctor 
before that, their only answer was hysterectomy. 

And so one of the reasons we know that this is anti-Blackness is, 
as Annika talked about in the beginning, to sterilization, there are 


loads of studies that talk about the levels of hysterectomies that 
Black women get, and Latinx women, women identified folks as 
well. So there's plenty of research on that. But Annika, thank you 
for sharing that very personal story. And thank you for making 
space for that, Purvi. 

So you've kind of already started talking about these responses 
that people have. The second question is can you talk about the 
responses that you've seen directed at survivors or communities 
that choose to protect themselves when the protective structures 
don't? So the question is, what are some of the responses that 
you've seen, Purvi, either towards survivors who choose to 
protect themselves or communities that choose to assert their 
lives. What are some of the responses that you've seen in five 
minutes or less? 

PURVI SHAH: Well, as we know, again, as we talk about carceral 
feminism-- sorry, this is Purvi again-- that one of the common 
responses is to punish and incarcerate, which is why we have a 
movement and organization called Survived and Punished. 

So if we think about, often, women and girls who are 
incarcerated, and thinking about the system of mass 
incarceration, I spoke before of immigrant detention of survivors 
and children as well. And when we think about incarceration in 
this country and how it's particularly targeting Black and brown 
communities, and a legacy, a new enactment of enslavement. 


And when we think of in schools, girls who may have faced sexual 
assault, boys as well, and instead of getting resources, oftentimes 
they're sent to detention or expelled or other punitive responses. 
And so I think that in terms of responding to these situations, it's 
really amazing to see organizations like Susan Burton's 
organization, A New Way of Life, which is for folks re-entering 
communities after incarceration. There's also an organization in 
Oregon started by Trish Jordan called The Red Lodge Transition 
Services. 

And so there are these connections that are made in terms of, 
again, the actual healing that needs to happen of various 
traumas, including what it looks like when the system punishes 
you for fighting back, when the system punishes you for trying to 
be safe and to protect yourself in the ways that you know how. 
And that happens, again, fundamentally, because the system has 
failed. 

ZOE FLOWERS: Thank you so much, Purvi. So I'm going to open 
this up to any of the speakers, Maria, Lorienne, Annika. What 
responses have you all seen other than the ones that Purvi has 
lifted up? And some resources, some organizations that are 
working to address those issues. So whoever wants to jump in, 
again, Purvia, Maria, Lorienne, you have the floor. Or I'll choose 
you. Maria, why don't you go ahead? 

ANNIKA LEONARD: Oh, OK. 


ZOE FLOWERS: OK. Go ahead. Go ahead, Annika. 

ANNIKA LEONARD: OK. And I actually think this is perfect to just 
kind of highlight some of the things that Purvi has mentioned. So 
she mentioned a group class Survived and Punished, and she 
mentioned what we know as the sexual abuse to prison pipeline, 
when young women, particularly Black and Indigenous girls, are 
criminalized for behaviors that are associated with them 
surviving. You have organizations like Survived and Punished, 
who jump in and basically advocate for the lives and the freedom 
of the persons who are being impacted in a negative way. 

And so one of the things that I wanted to bring to light in this 
conversation, we in Milwaukee have a young woman who is now 
facing life in prison because she chose to protect herself against a 
person who caused her sexual harm in the past, who facilitated 
drug-induced sexual assault, who happens to be a white 
American. She happens to be a Black girl who was 16 at the time 
that he began grooming her. 

Police found evidence. They found hundreds and hundreds of 
tapes of child pornography. They received a call-- and I believe 
this call was in February of 2018-- they received a call from a 
young woman saying that help me, he's trying to kill me. They 
found a young Black girl walking down the street in just a bra and 
a shirt, a jacket. 


And at that time, they went and arrested this person. And after 
they arrested him, he posted bail. He posted a $20,000 bail. He 
was released, and then he caused harm and attempted to cause 
harm against Crystal. Crystal defended herself. And now she's 
being criminalized and facing life in prison for defending herself. 

So essentially, she's facing more jail time than the person who 
has caused all of this harm. She is facing more jail time than a 
person who has a history of committing harm against Black girls. 
And it is reminiscent of what has happened to our ancestors on 
this land because it was legal to rape Black women, girls, men, 
boys, and every other gender along the spectrum. It was legal 
because we were considered property. 

And so this young lady is facing life in prison because she was not 
protected by some of the protective structures that were in place. 
She was adultified, which means that basically, when people look 
at her as a 16-year-old, they did not see a 16-year-old. They saw 
an adult. They did not understand the cognitive disadvantage that 
this young woman held in terms of being in a position where he 
preyed on her. And he was an adult, and he required her to do 
what he wanted her to do. 

And so I just needed to lift Crystal up. And she's also another 
that I light a flame for because this is a great example of how the 
system has failed Black girls in particular. And then even when 
we think of the criminal justice system, there are so many-- like 


Indigenous girls face highest rates of detention, face highest 
rates of abuse. And so these are my examples, and I'm going to 
leave space for everyone else to provide theirs as well. 

ZOE FLOWERS: Thank you so much, Annika, and to all the 
speakers. So again, the name of this series is Shaping the Future 
because we're raising these conversations, and we are looking 
forward at the same time. How can we change these structures, 
or tear them down and start all over again? 

And so I know there was some conversation about restorative 
justice. Before I switch to Maria, Purvi or Annika, do you have 
any responses or organizations? We have Survived and Punished. 
Are there any other responses to counter what continues to go on 
that folks could either get behind-- I see that you put Crystal's 
information in there. What are some other sort of marching 
orders that folks could take from this conversation? 

ANNIKA LEONARD: Yeah. This is Annika. And I did put the link in 
for Crystal Kaiser. And I think in terms of other marching orders, 
I think to really look at and research-- like for instance, there's 
Creative Interventions. If you Google that, you will see how some 
communities have replaced a formal criminalization process or 
structure with how they, as a community, have solved issues 
such as a young person being sexually harmed by a family 
member and things of that nature. So there are alternatives to 
incarceration that I think that we can look at. And Creative 


Interventions, once again-- I'll put the link in here-- is a great 
example. 

Organizations like Insight, organizations like GEMS in New York, 
the Center for Court Innovations, they have a process in which 
they provide advocacy for people who have done sex work, and 
they have a youth court where youth are taught and practice 
restorative justice. 

So there are so many examples of how we are looking towards a 
different future and reshaping the future of institutions that have 
caused us harm. 

ZOE FLOWERS: Thank you. This is Zoe. Thank you so much, 
Annika. So go ahead and put those resources in the chat, if you 
will. And we are going to switch for the interpreters. 

Great. So Maria, please talk about some of the responses that 
folks have when communities or survivors choose to assert 
themselves, assert their lives. 

MARIA DEL ROSARIO FRANCO-RAHMAN: So one case that has 
been with many of us these past few days is the one of Vanessa 
Guuillen. And Vanessa Guillen serves our military and 
experienced sexual harm while in the line of duty and lost her life. 
And I think of Vanessa and her reaching out to her family to 
share about the harm that she was experiencing, and what was 


the consequence that Vanessa was met with. When we think 
about the gradations of harm, she was met with the ultimate 
form of violence, murder. 

And I think about, again, this concept of protective structure. And 
when we think about something like the military, from the 
outside, it seems this is a institution that is designed to keep us 
safe at a national level. According to the Department of Defense's 
website, they describe the military as an all-volunteer force that 
serves to protect our security and way of life. So emphasis on our 
and way of life. 

And so fitting with our discussion here this afternoon, this 
morning, what is meant by our. Who are they talking about when 
they say our? We know that it's not our communities of Black, 
Indigenous, and people of color. When we talk about way of life, 
what way of life? Is it patriarchy? Is it white supremacy? And how 
did that play out in Vanessa's story? 

And we think about another protective structure, say a school 
designed to support our youth and our young people. And I think 
about growing up and knowing that the military came and 
specifically wanted to speak to Black and brown youth. And we 
see this today as well. And having a conversation with my 
goddaughter about Vanessa, she described the military as a work 
force, and I thought about how that rings true in our community. 


So many of the good kids, quote, unquote, good kids will opt for 
that military route because it is a form of economic security. 

And so, again, how are these things removed from our access? 
And how are we being positioned or steered into a direction to 
align ourselves with, perhaps, an institution like the military that 
inherently is an institution of violence cloaked as one of safety. 
When we think about war, when we think about what are some of 
the strategies-- sexual assault being one of them-- how is it that 
this individual that caused harm to Vanessa was embedding their 
violence in the situation? 

And so that's definitely one high profile-- one case that so many 
of us are grieving right now and know that so many other 
women, women of color, Black and Indigenous women have been 
met with similar forms of institutional violence. 

In terms of models, in terms of the way forward, I do want to 
close with offering models that we can look at in terms of how do 
we look to really bring forward our voices of our ancestors, the 
medicine of our ancestors, in terms of healing modalities. And I 
really want to lift up the work of Dr. Valli Kalei Kanuha, who did 
the Namelehuapono Project or model. 

ZOE FLOWERS: Maria, I'm sorry. It's Zoe. Thank you. I have to 
interrupt you for a moment because the Spanish line has 
stopped. So the Spanish interpreter got cut off. So please hold. 


Wonderful. Great. OK. So we are back in business. So Maria, you 
were talking about Kalei's work. 

MARIA DEL ROSARIO FRANCO-RAHMAN: Yes. And just wanting to 
lift up-- I love the description of the model, so I'll just go ahead 
and read it. It's a native Hawaiian culturally-based group 
intervention that uses Hawaiian values, beliefs, traditions, and 
practices to address intimate partner, sexual, and family violence. 
It was developed under the guidance of Hawaiian cultural 
practitioners, elders, and domestic violence experts on Oahu. The 
model provides a holistic pathway to healing from trauma by 
integrating Hawaiian culture with other healing modalities 
situated in the unique and sacred milieu of Hawaii. 

And so I encourage you, if you're interested in looking at models 
that have really lifted up their medicine, their ancestors' medicine 
to allow us to shape a future that brings us to a more liberated 
place, I recommend checking out that work. 

ZOE FLOWERS: Thank you so much. This is Zoe. And so Maria, if 
you wouldn't mind putting that resource in the chat, if you 
haven't already. We have about five more minutes. There are so 
many resources in the chat. Those resources will be put on the 
bureau website. This webinar will be put on the bureau website. 
The actual chat will not, but the resources will be put there. 


So we've got about five more minutes. I want to thank everyone 
for staying on the call. And let's just take a deep breath together, 
all 287 of us. Taking a deep breath in through our nose, exhaling 
through our mouths. We have heard a lot of information today. 
So let's just take another deep breath in, exhale through our 
mouths. 

Thank you all for showing up. If there are any last questions, 
please put them in the chat. Please feel free to follow up with our 
presenters or myself if you have additional questions. 

And join us for our next webinar, which is about learning the 
lessons from missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada 
and how we can use some of their frameworks to confront 
violence against women here in the US. And so Annika will be on 
that conversation as well as Junetta Jamerson. And that webinar 
is sometime in July. July 21. 

ANNIKA LEONARD: Oh. I thought it was the 14th. 

ZOE FLOWERS: No. It's July 21. So our run-through is on the 
14th. So if you have not registered for that webinar, please go 
ahead and do so. We want to hear from you. And yeah, put any 
final questions in the chat. I don't know if any of the speakers 
maybe want to say one last word, one word for real. We've got 
three minutes. One last word from each speaker. 


Mine is grateful. This is Zoe. I'm grateful. Lorienne, you want to 
give one last word? 

LORIENNE CASTELLE: I was just going to use grateful, too, but 
just honored and committed. 

ZOE FLOWERS: Thank you. Thank you. Annika, one last word? 

ANNIKA LEONARD: Full. I feel full right now. 

ZOE FLOWERS: Yes. Maria, one last word. 

MARIA DEL ROSARIO FRANCO-RAHMAN: Possibility. 

ZOE FLOWERS: Ashay. Ashay to that. Purvi, you have the last 
word, sister. 

PURVI SHAH: I'm going to say alignment in circle. 

ZOE FLOWERS: Thank you. And so-- this is Zoe. I want to thank 
the interpreters. Thank you all so much. We are so grateful. 
Thank you to the bureau team. We have two minutes to spare. I 
mean, it don't get no better than this. So thank you all. Stay on 
the journey. Stay with us. Help us organize, and help us reshape 
what's happening. Zoe Flowers. I'm out.