Describing her film KIMMAPIIYIPITSSINI: The Meaning of Empathy, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers outlines the often unseen or under-appreciated aspects that underpin community mobilizations of all kinds: the social supports, networks, and forms of hard work that combine to create change. In this case, Tailfeathers is describing harm reduction in her home territories of Kainai First Nation, Alberta.

KIMMAPIIYIPITSSINI will be screened during the Blackwood’s upcoming four-part program Here, Better, Now (April 19–20). Serving to launch a new publication reflecting on the October 2022 program WISH YOU WERE HERE, WISH HERE WAS BETTER, Here, Better, Now details forms of solidarity, art, activism, and policy change emerging from the overdose crisis. Tailfeathers’ approach to making KIMMAPIIYIPITSSINI lays the foundation for Here, Better, Now. Below, we share two other foundational points from contributors Carlyn Zwarenstein and Jarrett Zigon.

In linking safer drug supply to disability justice, Carlyn Zwarenstein makes a crucial intervention in the conventional understanding of drug use as “chemical dependence.” As she points out, drugs change the body’s chemical composition such that they become necessary for comfortable everyday life. One of the pillars of disability justice is interdependence: the recognition that we all depend on each other. If interdependence can supplant the negative connotations of dependence, how else might we destigmatize and de-individualize narratives of substance use?

In the work of anthropologist Jarrett Zigon, the activism of people who use drugs and their allies is considered in equally expansive terms. What he calls their “politics of world-building” is not just resistance to the drug war, but the remaking of communities and ways of living—even in spite of so much death and suffering caused by criminalization and the toxic drug supply. We end with Zigon outlining future political horizons beyond the “now” of Here, Better, Now: