Episode One: Showing Up for People Whose Liberation is Tied Into Yours
Show Notes
In this episode we share a conversation with Nathalie Nia Foulk.
Nathalie Nia uses they or she pronouns and is a self described Ebony Southern Belle. Her work blends performance, history, healing justice, cultural organizing, and leadership development in service of all people, but particularly for Trans and Queer communities.
She talks about the role of solidarity in her work with the Last Call Oral History Project, a New Orleans based history and performing arts collective.
Original music for our podcast is written, performed and donated by Andrew Quo. You can find more at: http://deadtapes.co/.
Transcript
(A quick note about transcripts: please be gentle with us! Some effort was made to clean up the spoken word, but there are plenty of places that we opted to leave the original more or less the way it was spoken.)
Sophie Ziegler: Hi friends. My name is Sophie Ziegler. And you're listening to what is solidarity history? A podcast project in which I asked very smart people. What it could mean to bring solidarity to our storytelling work.
Oh, wait, this is all very first episode. So I should say something about what this is and why you should care. Let's see, let's start with something personal. So about six months ago, I quit my full-time library job. At that point, I had been a librarian and archivist for over a decade.
I'd worked in all sorts of cultural heritage institutions, and I'd started a number of community oriented projects on the side. Including the Louisiana trans oral history project through which I met most of the people who will be appearing here. But over the years, I grew increasingly dissatisfied with the work, with the way that these dominant narratives, just keep getting told over and over and over again. You know, the one, the rich, CIS straight white people who are doing great things and whose stories simply must be told. Right. So I wanted to spend some time thinking about alternatives. I wanted to spend some time talking to other people who are interested in alternatives. I want to think about other ways of sharing, preserving and telling stories. And so this will probably be a bit of a process, right?
Uh, this will likely take some time. It's a lot to learn. There's a lot to unlearn for those of us who have gone through formal training in this. Luckily, I feel like I've met a lot of people who are thinking along these same lines.
And so I asked some of them to sit down and help think about this with me.
Together we'll build a definition of solidarity history that we can use moving forward with this work into the future, Or at least that's the hope.
Each episode of this limited series podcast will focus on a conversation with someone who does some type of history and or storytelling work such as oral history or community history or journalism.
In short, this is me trying to figure out how to do this type of work in a way that's meaningful to the communities and causes I care about. I hope you'll join me. Okay, now we can do the theme song.
This week, I'm sharing a conversation I had with my friend inspiration and sometimes collaborator, Natalie Nia Foulk. Natalie Nia uses they or she pronouns and is a self-described Ebony Southern bell. Her work blends performance. History healing, justice, cultural organizing, and leadership development and service of all people, but particularly the trans and queer communities.
In fact, she does a lot. Maybe we'll just let her say it for herself.
Nathalie Nia Foulk: I think the first thing I would say is that I'm a healing justice organizer, a oral historian, a performance artist a beehive enthusiast for Beyonce fans who might be listening to this.
And generally I'm doing work across the, like art field, the organizing community and the healing justice community, and of course the historian community and the trans and queer community specifically.
And I am the co-director of the Southern Organizer Academy, which is a capacity building initiative of that centers or community organizing and healing justice cohorts.
So we, if someone's too busy running their campaigns to train new folks, if someone's like I just wanna brush up on these skills, or if someone is, oh, I wonder what it, what, how can I make change in my community? We take them through a three month cohort with eight units of healing, justice and community organizing skills.
And so I do the Southern Organizer Academy. I also am part of the Southerners on Ground NOLA chapter. Of course I'm in coalition with the legislative organizing Coalition for all l lgbtq Louisianas.
I also wanna shout out alternate roots too, I'm the cultural organizing programs manager there. I just wanted to make sure that we got that for anyone who might be listening, if you're in the South particularly alternate roots supports and develops and organizes with artists and organizers across the region, the southern region. I just wanted to make sure I got down there
And then there's last call
Sophie: Last call is mostly what we're talking about today. But it's clear that we could talk about a whole lot more, but let's hear a little bit more about that project.
Nathalie Nia: so last call. Is an oral history and performance collective.
And what they do is they document neglected trans and queer histories. And so yeah, last call started sometime around like 2013, I wanna say, and it's since then been able to like archive over near like close to a hundred oral histories of folks who stories never actually exist or existed, but whose stories were never documented in a particular way.
And so we collect and creatively interpret those oral histories and that looks like theater, that looks like public mapping, like the project that you and I do.
It looks like listening parties, it looks like a few different cultural products that come from the oral history so that people can see themselves reflected both in the past and in the present day.
And it's also a, just the honor of the folks who don't get written about in the history books, particularly in lgbtq plus history it tends steer towards white and for sure white, gay male, cisgendered male. And last call shakes up that narrative a little bit.
Sophie: We are currently living through such an amazing time and gay history. So many amazing works, timely works are being created right now. And still yet as Nia points out so much of it is focused on cis gay history.
And we know that queer history writ-large and especially trans history is still largely overlooked. Still largely unavailable to so many of us who need it so badly.
One of the topics I was eager to talk to Nia about is motivation. This is something that I talked to all the guests about for this project. And the idea is this right? So there are so many things that we could spend our time doing. Why are we doing what we do? Why are we doing this solidarity history work? Why are we reaching out and trying to document our communities to try to add new voices to the mix, right? It's not particularly easy.
Why not just do drugs and play video games on the couch, just, you know, just take one example.
And I loved what Nia had to say about this.
Nathalie Nia: I do oral history work, I do organizing and healing justice work because, I can, and because it feels good and because it's like, how else on this world would I spend my time? Other than trying to maintain the wholeness of myself, my community, and of our stories.
I came into last call cause I always was interested in doing storytelling, but the co-director of Last call, indie Mitchell was like, we have this theater thing happening. Why don't you. Come through. Why don't you like why don't you come in like audition for it? And so when I went, I didn't even realize that it was rooted in oral history.
I was just like, oh, I love to be on stage. I love to act. I love to perform. And turns out that was the Alleged Lesbian Activities play that we created from the Dyke Bar, oral history research project.
Sophie: Yes, you did here with this correctly folks. Nia is saying that last call makes theater pieces based on the personal narratives they collect. Let's listen to just a quick segment of alleged lesbian activities, just to get a sense of what's happening. And then we'll just bounce it back over to Natalie Nia.
[Segment from Alleged Lesbian Activities]
Nathalie Nia: There's not that much room in our lives for like radical imagination, or generative thought and being on stage is what led me to be an oral historian.
I think my motivations are always different. Sometimes it's direct clashes against the system, like being arrested I and sometimes it comes from like seeing myself and other people, like seeing other trans people and being like, oh I want everyone to feel this sense of "I belong," or "oh, I see myself in other people."
And there'll be these moments too that feel really hard whenever you're in like community conflict or you're in like internalized conflict or whatever, you realize that, oh, some things we can't make up for the state. Like last call could never do every single trans person's oral history. Every single story. And that's when you realize, oh, we actually are creating alternatives to the historical systems that exist. And so it feels that's, that feels really good to me
Sophie: I love the idea of doing this work because it feels good because there's joy in the connections. Because we want to live to everyone as we lift ourselves. And though it doesn't always feel good. Of course, right. Because life is messy and collaborations get murky.
There is an element of joy and understanding how your work fits within the larger picture of community liberation.
And is this idea of community liberation, right? This idea of being in service in solidarity with a community it's always complicated by the fact that we're part of many different communities, right. At any given time. And I found myself wondering how these overlapping and intersectional identity strengthen, but also potentially dilute the idea of solidarity, for example,
How do we choose a which community to work the most closely with in times that there's work to do in all of them? So I asked Natalie Nia about her work with queer and trans communities and how that relates to the work that she could be doing does often do in related communities. My question was messy, but she was very generous.
This is what she said.
Nathalie Nia: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think that's such a good question. I think being drawn to that community is I think a, it's always at the intersections. Because even in the rooms where I'm like showing up in a trans or queer specific space, I'm always like carrying like my blackness.
I'm always carrying my womanness, my femmness being at those intersections automatically in a lot of ways, like whenever you speak, whenever you exist or wherever you show up, is always happening.
I'm drawn to the trans and queer organizing work because I think if we liberate the most directly impacted people, if we give the people who are at the most intersections of systemic oppression, if we free them, then that just makes room for everybody else because of course, if like a black trans woman can vote of course we would automatically assume that someone who is like a white, cis male could vote.
I know that our movement work and our cultural organizing work has to be at the intersections. And I also happen to be at those intersections. And then I'll say too the draw to the community. It's because there's so much inherent magic in like transness, like in being able to make yourself and to be able to like practice or play with gender or to be able to exist outside of what boxes were already created before you were born.
It's a true act in like manifestation and, it's actually an like abolitionist act in a lot of ways too. And so I'm drawn to transness as an act of abolishing one version of yourself to create and transform into something else and the alchemy that's inherently involved in that.
Sophie: Tranness this magic. Transness as an abolitionist act. I've carried these words with me since she spoke them. I hope you also find the meaningful.
There comes a time in all my conversations for this show that I ask what solidarity means to my guests. And I love Natalie Nia's answer.
Nathalie Nia: I think the first thing I'm thinking ,about is solidarity as showing up for people whose liberation is tied into yours. And so for last call it means that sometimes you're doing oral histories, but also it means sometimes we're doing like, Public healing alters.
And so I think one of the first ways in which we like show up as in youth solidarity as a, an action for people whose liberation is tied up into each others. By connecting with our community and not just doing an oral history with them. It's about connecting, them to our larger artistic networks if they're creators and connecting them to any networks that might already exist.
And it's also about investing skill into people so that they can go into their movements to do the work. So our creative fellowship is really beautiful because it's not just about folks like making art.. That's very core and central to it, but it's also about connecting them to transcestors. Our trans elders, or people who are doing this work in the community are who down for like black trans liberation deepening our networks.
So not only is oral history, like about what you say, but it's also about how do things like feel and live in your body and using our, and being at the intersections of oral history and art practice.
And I think our work is really rooted in solidarity in the fact that it is so expansive and it can mean, oh, this person has never explored what it might look like to tell someone else's story in their body and to feel it in their body, and how do we do that and put that on the stage?
Or how do we do that in the workshop? Or how do we do that in ways that honors that story and allows us to be in like exploration of ourselves to connect to a that person's story, but also. To deepen solidarity in that way.
Sophie: One of the really, really hard things about doing oral histories. Especially when you're doing it for a community that you want to uplift, that you want to be in solidarity with it's the fact that you would never really have a sense of how it's doing. Right. You're setting it aside for the history. You're setting it aside for people who will come after you.
And it can kind of weigh on you that you don't know what the effects will be. So to hear Natalie Nia, talk about using art to put the oral histories to work in our lifetime. For those that we are in solidarity with now. And to tie that with our transcestors our trans elders whose stories we might be telling.
I love this so much. And I'm adding to our ongoing definition of "what is solidarity history?" by incorporating by bringing with me the idea that it is showing up for those whose liberation is tied up with ours.
So much love to Natalie Nia for taking the time to be part of this project. For sharing all these insights. All of this wisdom, as we continue to think about how it is we can use our history skills in solidarity with our communities.
We'll continue this journey next week, friends. I hope you stay tuned.
As we try to figure out what is solidarity history by speaking to very, very smart people who do really really great projects. Okay. Stay safe. Tell other people that you love, that you love them. Bye y'all.