Funding Indigenous Sovereignty: A Year of Giving at Unsettling
10% of our net revenue goes back out into the world. So where did it end up in 2021?
First off, I’ll note that this particular post is coming a week later than planned. If you’ve been on Unsettling’s “About” page, you might have read that I pledge to donate 10% of the net from subscriptions to groups doing work related to our many themes here. (Net, not gross, because there are expenses: both Substack and Stripe take a cut.) I had thought it would be nice timing, last week on Giving Tuesday, to share where some of those funds have gone this past year.
Alas, I had forgotten what has become of the attempt to counterbalance the consumerist frenzy of the American holiday shopping season with a day devoted to giving. As the pre- Giving Tuesday emails began flooding in, I knew it was senseless to send an email at all last week. How would you possibly find it? Presuming you are someone interested in supporting and following the groups doing good work out in the world, your inbox was surely as overwhelmed as mine. Just one more sad comment on the self-defeating nature of many of our social structures, I suppose, that something meant to make a day of goodwill gets reduced to a digital shouting match, or—as a friend commented on my Facebook post about the matter—“the Nonprofit Hunger Games.”
Giving Tuesday plays out as it does, I believe, because most organizations and nonprofits have little to zero real connection with their donor base or members of the public who end up on their email list. If they are even moderately successful, chances are they will quickly grow to a scale where personal connections simply are difficult to maintain. Thus they come to rely upon the same tactics as all money-driven entities in the mass marketplace, which mostly involves bombarding strangers with advertising, and using all manner of pleading or shaming to bring in the funds.
It’s a real struggle; as someone writing a publication for the internet, and hoping to earn a little income from it—at least enough to safeguard some of my time for writing—I face the same challenges. I’ve been slowly muddling my way through alternatives to that model. I appreciate Substack, in part, because I see it attempting to build a platform where advertising plays less of a role, and where writers interact with an audience on a more routine basis, slowly building something that feels like a relationship. Yet even here, much of what they recommend for new writers depends on the digital shouting match arenas already built elsewhere; for instance, there’s a whole body of recommendations for turning your Twitter followers into readers and then subscribers. (If you’ve seen my Twitter account, you know this is not a great strategy for me.)
Early on I determined that I would try to keep it fairly organic, and let the network of relationships I already have help serve as the primary base for my readership. It’s a slower growth model than most enterprises choose. But this year has also been something of an experiment anyhow, as I see where the learning and writing each take me. It’s been an interesting process to see both what comes out of my pen most naturally within the broad scope I defined at the start, as well as what resonates with those of you who are regular readers. Experiments take patience. Earth-bound growth takes patience. Relationships take patience. That all seems okay to me, and I hope it does to you, too—thanks to all of you for your patience as we find our sea legs over here.
I have tried to keep this year’s Unsettling donations in the same vein of natural connections and organicity—to see what relationships arise in the process of the work and my own life, and to support those efforts, rather than making an arbitrarily long list of groups and sorting them by some more rigid definition of impact. What does that really mean? Here’s how it all played out:
At the outset of the project—an act of faith, as I did not yet have any subscribers!—I made donations to Indigenous-led and Indigenous-focused media outlets that I expected to use in my own learning here. This included donations to the Native Daily Network (whose roster of contributors contains folks I met through their involvement in fossil fuel resistance in the Puget Sound area); Indian Country Today, one of the first Indigenous-produced news sites I began reading early on; Native Land Digital, producers of the native-land.ca map used by so many to familiarize themselves with the Indigenous territory on which they live; and a subscription and donation to High Country News, a non-profit news outlet which has been consistently investigating and reporting issues around land for decades now.
Earlier this year, in late winter and early spring, I criss-crossed Navajo and Hopi territory more than once. In honor of the time on their land and knowing the extremity with which COVID has impacted those nations, I donated to a grassroots-led effort to provide water, food, and other forms of support to members of those nations.
During the summer, as the fight against Line 3 picked up, I donated to a specific effort to help organizers from Oregon head out to the Line 3 resistance. Residents in southern Oregon had been fighting against a proposed liquefied natural gas pipeline for over a decade. In a major victory just last week—after years of residents helping quash one permit after another—the company involved finally pulled the project. Yet even before they had that news, folks fighting the Pacific Connector Pipeline sought to act in solidarity with those battling Line 3 by heading out to the Treaty People Gathering in Minnesota. Why not just give to the Line 3 activists directly? Much of that has to do with my own time in the Oregon pipeline fight: in late 2015 I hiked a couple hundred miles along the proposed route of the Pacific Connector, participating in events with communities along the way to try and strengthen connections between pockets of resistance and bring greater public attention to the issue. Helping build the bridge between these two efforts felt like a nice harkening back to the intent of the Hike the Pipe project, as well as a way to respect where I had a stronger relationship with the land while still supporting the Treaty People Gathering’s purpose.
This summer I also gave to NDN Collective, creators of the #LandBack campaign, after participating in their LANDBACK U program.
There’s been a pause since then; my anticipatory rounds of giving mean we’ve been over that 10% net mark for a while, and are only now beginning to come back down towards it. But I’d be more than happy to be made to send out more donations! You, of course, can help make that happen, in more than a few ways:
First, if you’re on the free list, consider switching and become a paying subscriber. If paying for a full year feels like a big commitment, it’s always possible to sign up on a monthly basis, contribute for a few months, and return to the free list if needed.
Second, if you know someone who might like to read the material here on Unsettling, Substack now allows you to gift subscriptions, with both monthly and yearly options. If non-material holiday gift-giving is your thing, this is a great choice.
Third, I’d like to hear more about groups that my readers are involved with or actively support. Who is doing work on reparations, repatriations, or restoring our relationship to land and land-based processes that you would like to shout out? What is the network of good efforts already present here? Please share! Comments for this post are completely open (usually they’re limited to subscribers only—best way I could think of to keep any potential trolls and bots out). And if you’d rather write me directly, email can go to unsettling@substack.com. I’ll pick at least one of these and send a contribution based on any new subscriptions before the end of the year. The donations thus far have been mostly focused on issues connected to Indigenous sovereignty, but that doesn’t need to be the case for all future giving, so if you think something is relevant, put it out there:
Most of the paid subscriptions thus far have come from friends who unabashedly jumped on board when I directly asked you for support. Please know that I feel immensely thankful for your belief in me and this work. And for those of you whom I don’t yet know personally, who found your way here through links or social shares and then chose to come on as subscribers: you’ve given a writer one of the greatest gifts, which is proof that others value the words and thoughts I put out in the world, and for that you have my lasting gratitude. Please don’t hesitate to reach out and introduce yourself and let me know more about what drew you here and what you’d like to see on these digital pages.
Personally, this year has been one of transitions and strange in-between times. There has been, obviously, the ongoing pandemic. But there has also been, for myself, major transitions in home and community, and possibly the most difficult ending to a relationship in my adult life thus far. Unsettling has been, strangely enough, one of the things keeping me feeling most settled throughout this whole time. There may be some real ups and downs happening in life, but sooner or later, I better be back here sharing something with you all.
It’s around this time last year that I began brainstorming a potential publication. As we round the bend into 2022, I’ll be doing lots of reviewing of what I actually made happen here, and planning for what comes next. Thank you, again, to all those who have come along with me for this initial year. I so appreciate that you are here.
With much gratitude,
Meg
P.S. Don’t forget to share in the comments about groups you think other Unsettling readers should know about and support!