Tammi – about a happy pig farmer and food sovereignty advocacy at the UN

Here comes the second interview of the WAF-Project! You can find a short summary of the interview, the podcast and the full transcript below. Enjoy!

Powered by RedCircle

---

Summary of the interview

with Tammi!

Talking to Tammi is a pleasure, as she beams with joy and great thoughts. As she says herself:

I often describe myself, Naomi, as the happiest person in the world because I get to do all the things that I love and care about. I get to farm and butcher and cook and garden and advocate and speak and write and read. It’s a very happy life.

She left the US very young, met her husband after a week in London and moved to Australia. After having spent around a decade in the city they felt they needed to go back to the land. When they heard a speech by Joel Salatin all things came together:

He talked about how you could contribute to a better food system as a farmer and make a living and be small scale and not have to be all the things that looked bad.

In her academic life (which still endures) she researched a lot on food production and consumption. She wanted to contribute to a better food system. She is part of a CSA (community supported agriculture model) and believes it is integral to a fair food system:

I think that you can’t get that when you shop in a shop and you can’t even get that when you shop at a farmers market because it’s just not the same commitment to each other: that signing up and saying, “yes, I’m going to buy your food for a year” and we’re like, “OK, well, I’m going to feed you for a year no matter what”.

They have had losses on their farms and none of their customers dropped out of the system but continued paying and bore the risk all together. Tammi on her side “went the extra mile” during covid to deliver the food to the eaters that couldn’t leave their houses due to lockdown. When there is a birthday or anything special she “throws in a few extra chops” or creates a competition to win the new bacon recipe. The kids of the subscriber call her “their bacon lady” and she states that “our farm is their farm”.

And that’s not how traditional agriculture… well, it’s not how traditional capitalist society works, right?

She invites interns over to her farm who want to become small-scale farmers themselves and she tours around Australia to deliver workshops on “ethical growing” and also on how international decisions influence the everyday lives of farmers. She is also actively involved in this decision-making process at the international scene by being the president of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, working with La Via Campesina and lobbying at the International Planning Committee for Food. About the small-scale movement she says:

I’d say the leadership of the movement has more women. There are a lot of… a lot of fierce peasant and indigenous women in La Via Campesina. It’s great.

She gives advises to women working or wanting to work in agriculture:

“Bite off more than you can chew and chew like hell”. And that’s in all of life. Be dauntless, never think it’s too hard, be willing to go.

Find yourself a strong female mentor, have somebody who’s going to be there to have your back to listen to what you’re experiencing with respect and kindness and support and wisdom. So choose somebody wisely who actually understands hard physical work, understands working in male dominated areas.

In general her positive attitude and her active involvement in making the food system better makes her believe that the world slowly understands that women are needed to make a good and sustainable shift in the system. She knows that when women are involved in agriculture more biodiversity is preserved.

Patriarchy got us into this mess and women are here to get us out.

She manages to work on her farm, write a PhD and tour around Ausralia and the world to advocate for foor sovereignty. In her office I could see a lot of books and she recommended a bunch of them. It’s a mixture of female and male authors and also addresses the issue of decolonization, which is integral to her current PhD:

---

Full Transcript of the Interview

Well, and the research supports you too, you know, we know that when women are involved in agriculture, we preserve more biodiversity. So it’s true.

Tammi: Naomi hey, how are you?

Naomi: Good and you?

Tammi: Yeah, good. Thanks. Sorry these things sometimes… The links send you to another place. I’m just going to close my door because there are people moving around. Sorry my office is next to the back patio. So it’s a beautiful, it’s like a really warm spring evening and so everybody’s decided to do work there. We’re… actually I show you. It’s very nice here right now, it’s just coming up to sunset. There you can see the garlic.

Naomi: Oh yeah! And you’re building a greenhouse next to the garlic?

Tammi: Ah yeah. Yeah because it’s very cold here in winter. I mean, you know, very cold by Australian standards. And so there are a lot of things we can’t grow because the season is too short. And so we thought we can grow chillies and lemongrass and things we put in.

Naomi: Because so far you do pigs and cattle and garlic, right? Garlic is your “plant”, right?

Tammi: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah and it came about because we love garlic, but also because we have the bone char that we make from the bones of the butcher shop. So we thought, well, we have this excellent fertility resource and we should grow a crop and extract that and sell it to our members.

Naomi: Could you explain how you came from being mostly an urban academic to being a farmer?

Tammi: Yeah, I mean, I was raised on a cattle ranch myself in Oregon, so I’m not always from Australia. I came in ninety two and I think I spent the first decade here in the city really happy to be a city person and thinking that that was what I wanted in my 20s and early 30s. And then the desire to be back on land and to be connected to land grew stronger and stronger. And so we were, my husband Stuart and I, we’re talking about how we could move onto property somewhere. We were permaculture enthusiasts. You know, we had an excellent backyard garden with chickens and everything all the time. But neither of us really saw ourselves just dropping out of society to go do that. And also, how do you buy a property and then drop out, right? You have to be able to pay for your life. So as we were exploring our options for moving out to the country, we heard Joel Salatin speak in Daylesford and… Which is our town… And we were probably hunting without much direction. And he talked about how you could contribute to a better food system as a farmer and make a living and be small scale and not have to be all the things that looked bad and that we were… I’d been researching and thinking about food and food production and consumption for a long time in my academic life as well. And so kind of all the pieces came together because we knew we wanted to be on land; I was already obsessed with food consumption and production. I’m from land, so I needed to be on land. And then he gave us the final answer, which is: you can actually make your living from farming, which nobody had ever said out loud to us before. You know, the common wisdom is that you can’t make a living from farming. And so when it all came together like that, “oh, wait, what, I can work to my ethics and be on land?”. This is great! And I wanted to continue promoting for healthier and sustainable food systems. And becoming a farmer seemed like really putting our skin in the game to say, “well, let’s see, let’s go find out for ourselves whether you can produce food responsibly and make a living doing it”. And here we are.

Naomi: You don’t only work on the farm but you also do a lot of advocacy work.  You started a PhD and you’re the president of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance. Sounds like a lot of work! All the livestock farmers I’ve met so far seem to work ten to 12 hours a day on their farm and have no holidays. How do you do that?

Tammi: Well, I think there are a lot of things about that. One is a matter of scale. We came very strongly with the intention of remaining very small. And although our demand has exceeded our supply since the second year, we’ve never been tempted to grow to meet the demand because we came with the philosophy of no growth. The growth, endless growth is unsustainable and we have this land, which is twenty eight and a half hectares. And so what kind of ecosystem can it support? And we had the business plan on the spreadsheet and we had the land with its own business plan of what life it can support. We just spent the first few years monitoring those two things together, so are we growing enough food to make a living? Yes, is the land able to sustain what we’re growing? We reached a point where we even though we hadn’t been growing, we reached the limit of the business model we’d written and it was too much. We decided it was too many pigs on the ground and slightly too many cattle as well. So two years ago, we made the decision to actually grow less. And that has been a really good decision for us. And then last year, we made the decision to bring in more permanent staff and take less money for ourselves and share it with more workers so that there’s lower workload for us and more work for others who want to be doing this work. So I think it’s a lot of it is that mentality. And then, I mean, to be fair, I’m a pretty organized person. So I think to a certain extent we don’t work 10 or 12 hours a day because we’re very efficient in how we use our time. And we think and talk a lot about those efficiencies, not cutting corners, but making the most of all of your time. So if you’re walking over there, what are you taking with you, so you don’t have to come back for it later, those kind of things. And with deliveries, you know, if you’re going on deliveries, what are you bringing home? If you’re going to the abattoir, what are you bringing back?

I think there’s the thing about farming mentality sometimes that values that busyness, as though that’s the value of being a farmer. And we don’t buy into that. We don’t agree. We think that you should have a healthy life balance. I mean, we work very hard, but like joyfully and not overrun at all and with time for advocacy and now a PhD. So I think not valuing the “oh, my sense of worth is to say I work 10 or 12 hours a day”. You know, it’s not. I mean, there was actually a farmer here who said to somebody who was coming to work with us as an intern who had applied for a job with this other farmer, and she said to him, “oh, you know, if you work here, it won’t be like at JONAI (Tammi’s farm). We don’t sit down for lunch together. We don’t have time for that”. And I don’t know whether she was saying it regretfully or like an allegation that we don’t work that hard. I don’t know. But I thought, “oh, you poor thing, you should sit down for lunch”.

We fight for what we eat and we eat what we fight for. One of our values is that if we’re not eating the fruits of our labour and growing gardens just for our own food, then we’ve got the balance wrong and we need to fix something.

Naomi: You grew up in the countryside, but in Australia, you were more urban female foreigner moving to the countryside. How were you received? How was it in the beginning?

Tammi: Well, I think interestingly, I expected a little bit of, particularly as female farmer, but even just as somebody coming from the city and as you say, somebody who still sounds foreign, even though I’ve been here nearly 30 years, I expected a bit of pushback from the local farmers especially. And we actually haven’t encountered that. They’ve been quite welcoming and grudgingly admiring of our success, even though they think we’re wacky, you know, and they don’t want to do what we do, but they can see that we’re running a successful farm. And farmers always, in my experience, do admire others who are making a living, you know, because it’s a hard job for so many people. And I think for me, because I did come from the country myself, I probably felt like I was accepted more easily in a rural community than the city to a certain extent. And I accepted myself more here. For me, it was very comfortable to come back to driving pickup trucks and, you know, wearing dirty old clothes and not having to dress to go down the street. So for me, it was very homely and familiar, felt good to come to the land.

Naomi: Do farmers in Australia receive a lot of subsidies for what they produce?

Tammi: Not at all in Australia, there are virtually no subsidies in this country. So the only kind of subsidies they have are when there’s extreme drought or bushfires, there will be relief packages for those affected areas, but otherwise, no. We’re basically completely unsubsidised, which is what makes it really difficult for those in the commodity agriculture space to compete because they don’t have the subsidies that like the Europeans have or the Americans have, and they’re competing in the same global market without that advantage. And yet still they are there. So it’s interesting. Here is something, like over 80 percent of farmers have an off farm income. Almost none just have income from the farm or subsidies because we don’t have the subsidies. So they all earn another income somewhere, pretty much.

Naomi: Is the farmers population growing and decreasing in general?

Tammi: Decreasing for sure and the average age of farmers is going up, I think the average age now is fifty six maybe for a farmer. But what’s interesting in our food sovereignty movement of the small scale farmers, the average age is much lower. I would guess at the highest, it’s in the late 30s. And we have a growing number of people coming into small scale farming and those of us in the movement have been actively fostering that for years, doing everything we can to encourage people to get into small scale farming.

Naomi: How is the gender balance among farmers?

Tammi: In traditional farming circles very male dominated, even though women… So women often will only identify as a farmer’s wife when in fact, when the surveys go deeper, the majority of them participate in the farm as well. But they don’t describe themselves as farmers. The lineage of passing farms on often it bypasses the women entirely. It only goes to sons or it gets sold. That’s really common in kind of conservative old school farming. But again, in our movement, I would say, if anything, it’s equal in terms of gender representation. And I’d say the leadership of the movement has more women.

Naomi: For example for La Via Campesina I also have the impression that there are a lot of women at the forefront.

Tammi: There are a lot of, a lot of fierce peasant and indigenous women in La Via Campesina. It’s great. I love working with those women.

Naomi: Where do you do the link between food and feminism?

Tammi: Eating food is personal, political and agricultural. And coming from a feminist perspective about the relationship that producing and consuming food has with the way we raise our families, with the values we espouse for society. These are all, for me, deeply feminist acts because of our role in resetting the equities, including the kind of equitable questions around how we treat the ecosystem more broadly and our part in it, instead of just that very patriarchal notion of human exceptionalism and “we’re here to dominate the environment”. I think the eco feminist approach of “we’re here to be with the land and with the environment” is critical to the change and the movement that’s happening. Also, of course, working with women from the global south in particular, and the much greater disadvantages they’ve faced in terms of access to land and resources and the ability to direct things on farms, even when they’re the primary workers on those farms. We know they produce the food, but they have very little Decision-Making power. So it’s a basic feminist act for me to advocate on their behalf that they should have an equal say, at least an equal say, sometimes, maybe they should have more than equal say in what’s being produced and how.

Naomi: So do you tour around the world to advocate for that? Or you’re mostly based in Australia?

Tammi: No, up until covid around the world for sure. I think the last couple of years I was overseas at least six or seven times a year for meetings of La Via Campesina, of the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty and we attend lots of UN meetings which are now being held online. Yeah, I mean, most that work is in bureaucratic and diplomatic circles with the UN stuff. And then, nationally in Australia, most of my travel would be more public advocacy. So being out, speaking and talking with people and running workshops and that sort of thing.

Naomi: In these international bodies, do you feel you have more access to it as a former academic than people who were born and raised and work on a farm? Or do you feel like the civil society mechanism is well designed in a way that everybody, even without academic background, can have a say?

Tammi: I think the last decade, especially since the formation of the Civil Society Mechanism in 2009, we’ve seen a vast improvement in civil societies’ genuine access to the decision making processes, but also the IPC (= International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty), which was established in 1996 and has been a forum that’s been fiercely about peasants and indigenous people and fisherfolk having the primary voice and so the academics and NGOs are there to play a supporting role and help lift those voices. But the voices are actually from the people who are doing the food production. So I think the spaces are quite open for that now. The question then is sure, the FAO has an MOU (= memorandum of understanding) with the IPC and we’re all there to be heard. When you first arrive as a peasant from the global south, it’s more overwhelming than when you arrive as a peasant from the global north with an academic background. But I’m here to tell you from the comparison of my first experiences of meetings and watching other people’s first experiences of meetings, and then when you get to where you get to after years of doing it, it’s actually hard for all of us in the beginning and no matter their background, academic or not, I find that my comrades from the non-academic spaces, they become just as strong an advocate because they are experts in the subject material. And as long as you stick to that, as long as that’s what they’re speaking to, they nail it. They’re so good at what they do, so I think there’s some easier stuff coming from an academic background, but it doesn’t make you any more effective in my experience. You know, peasants speaking their truths actually is very effective in those spaces. And so the beauty is something like the IPC is such a strong collective that whenever there’s somebody new coming into the space, they’re very well supported. And, you know, our meetings are endless. So if you’re going into a meeting of the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, for example, and you’re going to have five days of meetings, you will start with an IPC meeting in the morning at like seven thirty or eight before those meetings start at nine thirty. And then when they finish at four thirty or five, you will then have another two hours of evaluation meetings amongst yourselves. So we’re doing heaps of that peer to peer support to come into the space.

Naomi: You are part of the CSA – community supported agriculture model. Could you briefly explain what it means and say if you think it should be an integral part of the food system or if you believe there are better alternatives to link consumers and producers?

Tammi: So as a CSA farmer, I can definitely say I think it’s integral and I think that we should see a lot more of it, because what we’re talking about is a solidarity economy where eaters sign up to support farmers through thick and thin and the farmers sign up to feed eaters through thick and thin. And so we’ve seen in our eight years that we’ve now been a CSA, we’ve seen everything from, you know, we’ve lost animals and the community has been there to support us. And we didn’t have lost income because nobody left. They kept paying it until we could provide the meat again. So we’ve actually seen the sharing of risk borne out. And that’s not how traditional agriculture… well, it’s not how traditional capitalist society works, right? And on the flipside, we’ve seen during covid because of the extreme lockdowns we’ve had here in Victoria and Melbourne in particular, our members couldn’t travel to their hubs because if there were further than five K from their house, they can’t go pick up the meat. So we literally went the extra mile and did the further deliveries, I mean, in the case of hundreds of kilometres further to make sure that they could access their food. And I’ve been a bread baker for a decade, and so I offered them all little starters. I grew a bunch more starters from my starter at the beginning of the pandemic and took it to them. And just because the ones in the city have been in this lockdown, we had a new bacon recipe that I developed and so we had them win the golden ticket to try the new bacon. Things to make their lockdown life a little more amusing. And I think that you can’t get that when you shop in a shop and you can’t even get that when you shop at a farmers market because it’s just not the same commitment to each other: that signing up and saying, “yes, I’m going to buy your food for a year” and we’re like, “OK, well, I’m going to feed you for a year no matter what”. And then when something else goes wrong or when your child has a birthday, I’m going to throw in a few extra chops or, you know, it’s a totally different way of having a community of eaters and farmers work together.

Naomi: So, you know your consumers and the consumers know the producers.

Tammi: They do and most of them have been to the farm. Not all of them. Some in the city haven’t come up to the farm, but they’re welcome every year to an open day. The ones here in the region do come and pick up their meat or visit and bring their children to go see the animals and have a picnic. Our farm is their farm. And the children describe me as their bacon lady, and it’s so lovely.

Naomi: Do you invite a lot of interns and woofers over to your farm?

Tammi: So we haven’t really had woofers in a number of years because after the first year of having woofers, which was a fabulous experience, we really enjoyed hosting people who were mostly chefs, actually, who came and did that with us. And then we changed to the interns because we wanted to target specifically people who wanted to learn these skills because they want to be growers. And so rather than travellers looking for an interesting experience. It’s been really successful in terms of, I mean, right now, the last four of our interns are now immediately onto farms and share farming arrangements and actually work together. So the last two interns are farming together and the two before that are farming together.

Naomi: That’s great. And so this is also what you promote when you tour around Australia? You teach people how farms could be run?

Tammi: Yeah, yeah. So we do a number of things. Basically when it comes to teaching or running a workshop, I do whatever that community says they need from me. So if it’s how to run a small scale business model and make a living, then that’s our “grow your ethics” kind of workshop that I teach. If they want to learn more meat literacy because they’re new livestock farmers and they don’t understand the different cuts on the carcass themselves and they want to learn more about that and how to explain it to the people who eat their food, then I’ll run that workshop for them if they’re wanting to know how. If they’re wanting to know how international global governance affects domestic policy, that’s what I’ll go and talk to them about. I do what they need. It’s always about what that community is looking for.

Naomi: Do you also work with indigenous communities?

Tammi: Increasingly now. Not very much in the early years, although there was a strong desire to from the beginning with AFSA, but we had a lot of trouble making meaningful contact with local indigenous communities. I don’t know how much you know about indigenous Australia, but it’s the kind of kinship systems and the way they govern their own society is extremely localised and the governance is embedded in the local knowledge holders who know that land better than anyone because they’re older. And so there’s this deep respect for the elders and the younger generation don’t have the right to advocate… to represent their people unless the knowledge holders give it to them. So because we’re a national organisation based on Democratic models, based on Western democracy, it’s been really hard to find the Ins for that. But we’re getting better at it right now. So it’s part of my PhD to trying to ask these questions about how we decolonize agriculture. So I’m making more contacts with local indigenous groups like the Djadjawurung, that’s our local people where we farm. Our last intern actually was also a young indigenous man. So he and I are co-authoring a paper for the “Oxford Real Farming Conference”. We’re talking about how indigenous and non-indigenous species, not just humans, can have symbiotic relationships if we’re actually exploring the way we work together in more meaningful ways and not exploitative relationships. So, yeah, like we’re making progress, but it’s slow.

Naomi: “Farming while Black”, for example, in the US is also a big topic.

Tammi: Huge and right now it’s exploding all over the world, which is fabulous. Like, I love that it’s such a big topic now and that we’re all having to do better. You know, I think some of us, like probably you and me, have been well-meaning our whole lives. But we didn’t necessarily know how to act on our good intentions. And this movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, is really forcing us to examine that more closely and do better.

Naomi: Do you think you have found how to make the world better? By working on your farm and doing all the advocacy?

Tammi: I can participate in making the world better for sure. Definitely. I certainly don’t have any kind of savior or messiah complex that I’m here to save the world. I want to participate in that, though, and I’ve always wanted to participate. And I think this is the most meaningful for me because it’s grounded in my daily toil. But it’s also taking it to the highest policy levels that you can be at and trying to make those spaces speak to each other so that the highest policy levels hear the voices of those who are caring for country and so that those who are caring for country hear what’s being said about them up there. And we bring it back for them and just get that feedback loop happening. I often describe myself, Naomi, as the happiest person in the world because I get to do all the things that I love and care about. I get to farm and butcher and cook and garden and advocate and speak and write and read. And it’s a very happy life.

Naomi: What would you advise women who want to work in agriculture?

Tammi: One of the things I would tell anyone, women or men, is something my dad taught me: “bite off more than you can chew and chew like hell”. And that’s in all of life. So if you think it’s… Be dauntless, never think it’s too hard, be willing to go, but don’t just go senselessly, think things through. And if I was talking to women specifically, I would say “find yourself a strong female mentor, have somebody who’s going to be there to have your back to listen to what you’re experiencing with respect and kindness and support and wisdom. So choose somebody wisely who actually understands hard physical work, understands working in male dominated areas”. You know, so I think especially because I became the butcher on the farm, which is very non-traditional, people think, “oh, is that really strange?” But because I never worked as a butcher in a high street butcher, I just run my own butcher shop, I never had to be exposed to the “oh she, what is she know?” Yeah, I haven’t experienced much of that kickback. I mean, I still get the people say to me, “oh, how long has Stuart been butchering?” And it’s like “he doesn’t. That’s my job.” Yeah. I think with women also trusting your instincts, don’t let especially men tell you that your instincts are wrong about that you need to look after the animals properly or that you should do things in a certain way that have a more, more feminine and feminist approach. I think, you know, stand your ground and do things the way you think are right, because just remind them: patriarchy got us into this mess and women are here to get us out.

Naomi: Do you think that in the future it’s going to get easier for women in agriculture?

Tammi: Yes, I do. I do. I think patriarchy has had its time and we have so many significant levels of society from grassroots organizations of women looking after each other and intersectionality with other movements and also governance spaces, talking about the role of women and the needs of women and the need to make sure women have education and clean water to actually fix the ills that are facing the world. I think we’re at a major turning point and covid is really helpful to that, to be honest. Sure, it’s a global disaster. It’s awful for so many people, but it’s also probably just the major disruption we had to have to rediscover what we need to value. And one of those things is women and our role in fixing things. Yeah. I mean, I don’t think it’s going to cure capitalism, but it’s forcing re-evaluation of things like brutal supply chains and there’s a lot of governments are looking at the need for greater self-sufficiency, domestic self-sufficiency. Our government in Victoria is looking at investing in more regional self-sufficiency, local food systems, because they saw the risks in the system when the abattoir is shut or at diminished capacity. And they’re like, “oh, wow, maybe having everything centralised in the city isn’t so smart.”. “Yeah, we have been saying this for some years, but we’re really glad to hear you say it now. We’re just going to let you think it’s your thing – like, we’re here to help”. I’ve resisted, well, I haven’t always resisted, but I’ve sometimes resisted just saying: “so how does it feel knowing the hippies were right?” Like my friend… Have you had a look at Rob Wallace’s work? He’s the one who’s just got the new book called “Dead Epidemiologists”. His work has been on the rise of new pathogens because of industrial livestock production. And he’s been banging on about this stuff for twenty years and being rejected as this leftist Marxist, you know, “what does he know?” And now he’s the darling of the hour. Like everybody interviews Rob because he forecasted it, right? And he has this new book that’s just been released and he says “everybody’s a socialist in a pandemic.” And he’s hoping enough of it sticks.

Naomi: Do you have any book recommendation?

Tammi: Oh, my God. So many. I mean, well, have you seen Afsas book “Farming Democracy”? So that’s that’s the book. You’ll find it on the Food Sovereignty Alliance website. And there’s e-books if you just want to download the e-book, that’s about eight small scale farms. We’re one of them. There’s a lot of fabulous women in this book, actually. And then, I mean, have you seen “a Foodies Guide to capitalism”? This is a really good read. It’s a really good primer about the economics of the food system that are driving so many of the negative consequences. And then there’s another one here called “Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture, a New Earth”. This is an Australian book. It’s huge. Charlie is a regenerative farmer in Australia on a big property, a big broad acre farm. He writes about how these huge farms have transitioned to regenerative agriculture because they’ve seen they can’t keep destroying the land.

You want me to continue? Actually if you want one by a feminist material semiotic scholar “Staying with the trouble” – Donna Haraway. That’s what I’m reading right now for my PhD. She writes about reworlding and “becoming with” other species and the need to… Like it’s tapping into a lot of indigenous ways of being in the world. And again, that rejection of human exceptionalism and acceptance that we’re just one part in the ecosystem. And she had this great thing I read the other day about even when we talk about symbiotic relationships, because usually coming from a patriarchal lens, there’s the idea that one is the host and the other is there, but not doing any harm to each other. But actually the whole point of a symbiotic relationship is that they need each other. They both provide something of value to the other and there is not one that’s higher than the other. And so wow, yes! I could go on, I’ve got books everywhere. Oh actually, the other one I would like to suggest, in terms of decolonization… This is by a young Australian woman “decolonizing solidarity”. She wrote this only a few years ago. She’s a non-indigenous woman. And she did her PhD thesis on decolonizing solidarity. And she works closely with indigenous peoples and she’s serving as a kind of bridge to stop forcing Aboriginal people to do the work of educating all of us in how to be better allies. So she has kind of offered herself up as somebody who’s done that work to learn how to be good allies. And then she teaches us. So it’s a it’s a really great book. I’ll stop, though, on the books!

Naomi: Thanks a lot, it was great talking to you!

Tammi: Yes thanks Naomi. That were good questions, good to think about them. Have a good day!

Naomi: Thanks you too!