 Okay, I'm gonna get started. I'm gonna do my little introduction, Wanda, and then introduce you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the San Francisco Public Library's virtual library and today's online screening of the powerful film, Belly of the Beast. Today's screening will be followed by a discussion with activists Kelly Dillon and Cynthia Chandler who are featured in the film and will be in conversation with Wanda Sabir about their fight to enforce sterilization in California's prisons. We are thankful again to be partnering with Ms. Sabir who has shared her woundfulness programs with us through the library. You can find these on our YouTube page and are humbled to be included again in her work to assist the black community in trauma healing. I'm Shauna Sherman, manager of the African-American Center here at the main library. Before we get started, it should be acknowledged the library is located in the area now known as San Francisco which is on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytushaloni peoples of the San Francisco peninsula. As the original peoples of this land, the Ramaytushaloni have never ceded, lost nor forgotten their responsibilities as caretakers of this place. We recognize that we benefit from living, working and learning on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives of the Ramaytushaloni community. Today's program is part of our One City One book, Citywide Reading of This is Ear Hustle, a book based on the podcast of the same name which tells the unheard stories that delve deeper into experiences of incarceration. Pick up the book at the library or check out the reading and discussion with the authors on our YouTube page. There's still many more opportunities to participate in programs, readings, films, screenings through December. Find more information on sfpl.org and thank you to the friends of the San Francisco Public Library for their support of this program and all library programs. Before I introduce our moderator, I wanna say a little bit about how our program will work today. After a brief introduction by Ms. Sabir, we will screen the movie through Zoom and registered participants can find a link and passcode in our chat for independent viewing through November 19th. The film is also available for checkout at the library. After the screening, we will reconvene in the same Zoom room and continue our discussion. And now on to our show. Ms. Sabir is a journalist. She publishes Wanda's Picks, college professor, virtual artist, depth psychologist and poet who believes in the power of art to change and shape social movements as well as assist in trauma healing and memory reclamation work. Co-founder of Maafa San Francisco Bay Area, she launched Womfulness Gatherings in March, 2021. She is the recipient of 2019's Distinguished 400 Award, which is given by the 400 years of the African-American History Commission established by the US Department of Interior and administered by the National Park Service. Again, we are so glad to be partnering again with Wanda Sabir. So please join me in welcoming her to our program. Thank you so much, Shana. And thank you, City of San Francisco and the San Francisco Public Library and African-American Center specifically for just hanging with me and our organization in bringing these wonderful, wonderful conversations, important conversations to the community and none could be more important than the one that we're gonna be learning about more today in the film, Belly of the Beast. But more importantly, these women, these two women, Kelly Dillon and Cynthia Chandler, are people who look for heroes. And a lot of times, you're looking in the graveyards. But these women, these two women are heroes and they are still working and they are still moving and they have organizations which need our support. And this particular story is just so riveting because it's a story of great, great, great harm. And that's what the MAAPA stands for. The MAAPA is keeps by healing for great calamity or reoccurring disaster. And specifically around what happened to my people, people of African descent. And if you think about who's incarcerated in California prisons, black women are definitely among the higher numbers in the population. Although the women who you're going to meet today, some of them are no longer with us, are certainly a part of this horrible, horrible harm that the state of California and its Department of Corrections perpetuated on these women, who when a person is incarcerated, they lose their agency. So what we're gonna do is because Kelly Dillon is actually the litigant, whose case led the class action, whenever she is talking about this, whenever we see the film and then she talks about this, she's reliving this trauma. And we really want to hold her in a real special way so that the harm is not as severe as it could be. I know she probably has some things in place that she does, but we wanna do something for her. And so what I wanted us to do, among other things, I wanted us to offer her some loving kindness in a concrete way. So what I want, I want you all to participate in. And of course, we wanna bring our ancestors into the room, the wombs that bore the wombs. We are living ancestors, but even if you're a male person, you are also born of a woman. So what I was gonna suggest is that everyone dropped the names of honored female ancestors into the chat. That's gonna be our river today. Drop names into the chat, honored ancestors. These are people that are no longer with us. And some of the women are no longer with us as well. So drop some good energy into the chat to sort of hold the space for healing and hold the space for nurturing because as I said, this film is, it's really powerful. So I want you to visualize, you can hold your, put your hand on your chest if you like. I want you to visualize a rosebud in the center of your chest. And if you wanna soften your eyes, you can. And so as you visualize this rosebud in the center of your chest, I want you to watch as the bud slowly opens and feel your heart center opening with it. And I want you to mentally repeat, this is you now. May I be happy, may I find peace in my life? Gonna do it three times. May I be happy, may I find peace in my life? May I be happy, may I find peace in my life? Now call to mind someone who you know is going through a difficult period. Imagine the warmth of your heart radiating out to this person. Use this person's name and repeat. May this person be happy. May this person find peace in his or her life. May this person be happy. May this person find peace in his or her life. May this person be happy. May this person find peace in his or her life. And now I want you to visualize Ms. Kelly Dillon. And I want you to visualize these sisters that she represents. And I also want you to visualize Cynthia Chandler because she wasn't the victim, but she was right there. And I'm sure she was affected. And all those, her little girls were probably affected too just as Kelly's children were affected. So I want you to hold them now in your heart with this rosebud that's opening slowly. May, Kelly and Cynthia and all of the women who are affected by this genocide find happiness. May, Kelly and Cynthia and all of the women who are affected by this genocide find happiness. May, Kelly and Cynthia and all of these women who are affected by this genocide and their families of course be happy and find happiness. May, Kelly and Cynthia and all of these women and their families find peace in their lives. May, Kelly and Cynthia and everyone affected by this genocide find peace in their lives. Shea and so it is. So Kelly Dillon is a survivor of domestic and gang violence. She became incarcerated at the age of 19 years old and was sentenced to serve a 15 year sentence. Her offense came from defending herself and children from her abuser that resulted in his death. Kelly's advocacy and community social work began by assisting fellow female inmates in peer counseling programs and social justice issues. This work led to her passion, purpose and professional journey upon reentry in 2009. Kelly L. Dillon is now the founder and executive director of Back to the Basics Community Empowerment Organization. She is working with the city of Oakland's Department of Violence Prevention as a program analyst to create strategies and program models to address the increase of gender-based violence. She serves on the board of commissioners for community and family services in the city of Los Angeles. Kelly has worked as an advocate, consultant and specialist in violence interruption and prevention services for over 15 years. In 2012, Kelly courageously staged, she's staged. Shared testimony in front of the California Senate as a witness to the unlawful and uncivil acts against women in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, CDCR. The rehabilitation, we put that in quotation marks like really, like really, like really, like y'all is lying. Sorry. And women's facilities performed at local county hospitals. A human injustice toward women's reproductive health and rights, that was what this was. Her testament was key for Senate and Governor Jerry Brown to pass Senator Hannah Beth Jackson's SB 1135 anti-sterilization bill into a law. In 2020, her organization back to the basics co-authored the AB 1007 bill with Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo, sorry. That influenced Governor Gavin Newsom to sign into his budget for reparations granting the compensation for survivors of California's sterilization program. Kelly takes a quote, boots on the ground, in quote, approach to address various forms of violence and offers her knowledge and commitment for California statewide efforts. And her beloved city of Los Angeles. Kelly continues to give her personal testimony and professional expertise to promote awareness, prevention and healing to anyone experiencing or has experienced a trauma and impact of violence. So welcome Kelly again, thank you so much for joining us. Cynthia Chandler, and I'm gonna read the long bio. So y'all just like hanging in there cause like I told you, these are heroes. And you need to know like, I mean, this is just a bio like you really need to like do your homework, watch the film and ask them all those questions that you can't find answers to. Cause they heck a busy woman, like who knows? You know, they gonna be here with us. Cynthia Chandler is a change agent, founder, business coach and attorney. Her innovations include launching the first organization advancing the rights of HIV positive women in prison, creating the compassionate release process allowing for the release from prison of terminally ill people co-found in the eviction defense center in Oakland, California and co-found in critical resistance and justice now. Early prison abolitionist organizations influencing the Black Lives Matter Network. Cynthia has spent the last 20 plus years campaigning in partnership with people in women's prisons to end and when reparations for co-hearthed sterilization of people in prison. And that's what we're gonna be talking about today. And one of those people and organizations is Kelly and her organization as well as California Coalition for Women Prisoners. I'm a former board member there. And I think our dear sister, Hafsa is gonna be in the room. So you can ask about that. I'm like, that's not in her body. I'm just like, I live in here, sorry. But this campaign that we're speaking about culminated in the end and when, let's see what I say. This campaign culminated in the legislative victory in 2020 making California the third state to provide reparations for survivors of historic state eugenics programs and the first state to provide reparations to people co-hearthed sterilizing state prisons. So yay for California, right? She had been doing it in the first place. Anyway, this campaign is documented in Emmy award-winning and Peabody nominated documentary which you're gonna see today for free. And you're gonna get a link and you're gonna be good for a week. So you could like have your own little party and raise awareness like, yeah. Sorry, this is not her bio either, this is me. Belly of the Beast. Cynthia currently is working to democratize the rule of law as director of Bali, B-A-L-I Bay Area legal incubator where she supports diverse attorneys in building successful law practices serving disenfranchised legal markets. Cynthia has received numerous prestigious honors for her contributions to social justice including the Auburn Lives of Commitment Award celebrating women of moral courage. Yeah, I told you they wore wings, right? Yeah, they got like, they got wings, they got caves, you know, like, you know, whatever. And she also got the inaugural four foundation leadership for changing world award. Cynthia earned a JD from Harvard Law School and a master's in criminology from University of Cambridge. She has two activist children and she learns from them daily. So welcome again, my heroes and we're so excited to have you. And do you have a few words to share with our audience before we watch the film? I just wanna say thank you so much for just your interest for taking time out of your Sunday. I know we've gone through a lot in these last three years. We go through a lot in the last week, in the last 32 hours. So, but to just have, to take the time out to just to watch the film, to learn more about like reproductive justice, to listen to the story of not only the victims but those that were the greatest allies that we could have ever had to bring justice to an awareness as to what was happening. I just wanna say thank you, thank you, thank you. We appreciate you, we appreciate your time because we know that if one person learns about one thing they can teach and tell 10 other people and then those 10 other people can tell it. And this is a part of our history. It's even though it's part of my personal history, Cynthia's personal history, but this is historical. It's historical for California and it's historical for women. And just, it's just so many things in general, but please, and I wanna say like enjoy the movie because the documentary is really deep but it's entertaining at the same time. So, it gets heavy. So I just wanna kind of give you the trigger that it does get heavy, it gets really emotional, but there are moments of triumph, there's moments of laughter and victories and stuff like that that is there too. So please stay, but if you need to take a minute to step away from the screening to gather, then that's fine, you know what I'm saying? But I will hope that you were able to strengthen and come back in so you can see the rest of what's happening. So I turn it over to Cynthia. Thank you, Kelly and Wanda, thank you so much for the most gracious introduction. So thank you. I wanna echo what Kelly just said and encourage folks to watch it and know that the story is bigger than us. Kelly and I are here today as sort of ambassadors of this issue, but really to Erica Cohn, the filmmaker of Belly of the Beast's Credit, she made it bigger than us. And I think Kelly and I both wanted this film to be bigger than us. I think it's a tale about how if you persevere and bond together across all kinds of barriers and build bridges with people and keep fighting, you can create change and that we all have the power to make change happen. So I hope, I find it oddly inspiring to watch despite the fact that it's part of my life. And I hope that you all find it to be really inspiring too. So Shana. All right, everybody. I will get the film started. Let's all reconvene here back at around 3.45. The film runs one hour and 21 minutes. So at 3.45, we will be back for our discussion. There is a link in the chat to watch it independently if it is too glitchy for you on Zoom. And I am gonna get started with the screening on Zoom now. Thank you everybody. I'm taking that journey. I haven't taken that journey in a while. So I'm thinking about happy endings and what Mary J. Blige sings, how it ain't over till it's over. So I wanted to know if you could talk about that happy ending, maybe bring us up to speed on what's going on now with regards to the reparations bill. And again, hey folks, these are our living heroes and you need to send some money to their organizations so that they can keep on doing that work. Oh, and MacArthur Genius Awards, like, yeah. And, you know, hands up to the director, Erica Kahn and Angela Tucker and all of the other creative team members who made this a wonderful, wonderful story. I mean, really, I mean, it's like, it's something that people are gonna be watching when I pass away. And I'm not going right at the moment. So Kelly. And then Cynthia. And then we'll let people ask you questions. Yeah, so it's, the reparation piece is it has multiple layers to it, right? And so I'm gonna have, I'm gonna let Cynthia kind of just talk about right now what she's been working on because she's been doing some dynamic work around getting legal support for those who are trying to submit and apply for the reparations as survivors or even to see if anything has happened to them before. So I'm gonna, this is what I'm gonna speak to. So far as a happy ending, right? So of course that was a few years ago. And I believe, so at first, of course, when you are incarcerated like that, the one thing that you hold on to is the fact that there's a happy ending outside of that oppression and that separation of family and whatever other tragedies you go through, right? And so many years, the happy ending for me would have been returning home to my family, my children also maybe finding love and just this whole little, what was present at the time. But now I've embraced the journey of what life brings, the good and the bad. And so now my definition of what happy is or my happy ending is that it has been transformed and it's been recreated. And I think that I have been choosing happiness all along. I have been choosing to look at the brighter picture or to look at the purpose in a situation to bring about a happiness or to bring about understanding of what happened and to just get life out of it, right? And so I just think that I've been now learning how to make each moment every day a happy day or a peaceful day or everybody have their bad days just like anybody else. But I think that I'm living in my happy time that I've ever had in my whole entire life is because I know myself today. Like because I know who I am today, I know my worth, I know my strengths, I know my talent, I know my courage, it's like I know myself today. And so that it's different than who I was when I was going through that time of feeling helpless and hopeless and defeated and discouraged in those times, right? So I just wanna say that I'm speaking to that. Now, did I get a happy ending? Yes, we won, we fought, we got the reparations for the survivors, right? So that was one part, that was one part of the fight. However, you know that when you have an unseen systematic enemy, there is never, you never can just totally like win a victory without them trying to find a way to either control that narrative to control stuff out of it, whatever. And so we have been left to now have to continue on in a fight in which we thought we were, you know, at almost at a finish line last year, we have now had to move forward and continue on in the fight of having to steal fight against systems of oppression and and that is not making it easy for survivors and it's not making it easy for us to really get the justice that we've been so lonely waiting for, right? So if the reparation program, is it in effect? Yes, it is. But I would like to pass it over to Cynthia because this is Cynthia's lane in which she's been like, I've been waiting for Cynthia to, like you see how young Cynthia was. So we're talking about 30 years ago, almost. You know that Cynthia started this fight with CDCR, you know what I'm saying? Of working with some of the women who were chronically having diagnosed with chronicles, chronically illnesses and diagnosis and so forth and fighting for them. And then it went into another thing with me and then now she's still having to fight now from the outside, not going on the inside but fight from the outside with the women, right? Around these same types of issues. The system will never change. You know, we are like, I'm gonna speak to that because I'm gonna speak to that but I wanna get to that because I have a, I need to speak to the moment of where we're at right now in time to address where we're at right now. So I'm gonna go ahead on and pass it to Cynthia. Thank you, Ms. Brenda. Thank you. Thank you, Kelly. At first I just wanna echo back with something that I heard in what Kelly just said which is in that happiness is a level of optimism and folks have asked me and Kelly and also Erica Cohn who spent 10 years of her life creating this film too. So we were all in this for a very long haul like what kept us going? And I always said like a little bit of pathology in that we can't quit. We are people who just don't and can't quit but there is also a huge amount of optimism I think in our spirits and really having faith that we are capable of making changes happen. And I think that that is probably the recipe for what made this possible in many ways. So in terms of what the reparations look like I mean shaping the reparations we worked in tandem with folks from the Disability Rights and Education Fund in California Latinos for reproductive justice who had been earlier looking at reparations for people who are survivors of historic eugenics. And we brought into that collaboration a lot of wisdom from people in prison around what justice would look like. And while this campaign was going on Justice now did interviews for about six years with people in prison about what justice might look like and what would reparations look like. And some of the elements that came out one was that we needed to and justice requires a violent stop, right? So that was part of why we did our first effort to have sort of a sunshine statute to make it very clear to the Department of Corrections and its employees that they were breaking the law but it's also why our most recent reparations bill had a component that mandates the state to notify people and tell them that they were sterilized. We know that many of the people sterilized in women's prisons were unaware of the fact that they were sterilized like Kelly. And so the violence continues the state violence continues to be perpetuated if people are not notified. So that was one component. We also wanted an actual acknowledgments I think what Kelly in the film mentions that there hadn't even been an apology. So part of what the legislation had included and it was an apology. The state is also now compelled to establish monuments decrying the harms of eugenics historically and how the lesson lost around that led to and contributed to these more contemporary abuses. And then finally we wanted a moment both for reparation for people who were survivors but also atonement for folks who had done harm. And this was a really important element of justice that was identified by people in women's prisons. And that was where the reparations came in and making sure that it was a significant reparation. It will never make anyone whole but we wanted it to be something where it was more than just merely a token where it would seem significant. And that's part of what we're going through now is the reparations process. Folks have another year and a couple of months to be able to apply for reparations and the implementation process is challenging. Things never go as one think that they would. Our impact team along with our collaborative partners both California Latinas for Productive Justice and Disability Rights Education Fund but also California Coalition for Women Prisoners. And then some new folks that we've picked up along the way Loyola School of Law and Public Council and the Los Angeles County Bar Association are all coming together to help make it so that folks can get representation and have a fighting chance to actually get the reparations that they're due. And that's sort of an overview of where we are. Yeah, and then not just that there we've also just to kind of piggyback on what Cynthia was saying we also are kind of hit a brick wall a little bit around the memorial for the survivors. And so where we thought that the survivors would have a voice in shaping what that memorial would look like and who would also maybe the style or how we wanna memorialize these events across the statewide. CDCR somehow was able to wiggle themselves into the controlling factor of that and have absolutely discourage and kind of create it. I don't know what's the word I can look for Cynthia. Create it like. Well, I think they've co-opted it. Yeah. I'm from survivors participating and having a voice in the matter. And so we'll be having an event in December and Berkeley for survivors or either maybe for community members that may want to also help advocate for survivors around creating the memorialization of the event that happened. So we're looking for that. So to sort of elaborate what Kelly's saying, in designing what the reparations would look like we did wanna give an opportunity to atonement to the government agencies that were responsible for the historic sterilization abuse as well as the department of corrections for the contemporary abuse. And in doing that, we wanted those agencies to have some level of responsibility for making this monument happen. Unfortunately, the agencies have delegated the responsibility for running the monument process to the department of corrections, which is the most contemporary abuser. So it's like giving the monument, the reins of control over this monument over to the agency that was the most abusive most recently. And instead of acting, coming to that responsibility from a space of atonement, they're clearly coming to it with the intention of having a big PR opportunity and a chance to make themselves look like heroes. Wish they were not. So there's a community effort to build a people's monument sort of in tandem with the department of corrections and the state is doing. And artists are welcome too. We're talking about and thinking about what such a monument really should look like, what would, where it should be, what elements it should have and what communities should be involved in it. And so that's something that will be happening again in Berkeley in the new year. Yeah, how do people find out about this gathering December 2nd? Like if you wanna attend, where do they go to find the information? Let me, well, as you asked the questions, let me go into the email and see if I can share with, I can share with Shana and Shana can share with the attendee. Okay, great. Yeah, I wanted to share some of the comments. So as you were speaking, Cynthia, someone said about CDC taking over the, I guess, the physical monument around atonement, which it would be, you know, you know, the people's statement around, around what happened so that it doesn't go away. If this was, if the eugenics goes back, the law goes back to 1979, yet CDC did it anyway, you know? And then the law said, okay, well, you didn't seem, you broke the law. And so we're gonna reinstate the same law again and include people who are incarcerated. But they were kind of already included anyway, but we're gonna say it, you know? So, which means that it could happen again, maybe even. So someone said, yeah, that's counterintuitive to how CDC quotation marks, I mean, in parentheses, parentheticals are operating. Someone has said, yeah, Sheila, who was the person? Oh, you said that, Kelly. Yeah, Sheila, the abusers and harmers, you know, are in control of the healing process, which that's not, that doesn't work. Why? So someone asked, oh, sorry. It's gonna say it's a really interesting tension between sort of, also I want to just raise up between the prison abolition movement versus reform movement. I mean, this is a clear example. Well, this is something honestly, like I tend to approach also justice work with sort of a learning mindset, right? Because we are trying to figure out how to create a nonviolent world where people are treated with humanity, right? And if we all had the solutions to that, we would all have Nobel Peace Prizes and so, but like we're all working towards this, right? So I feel like there are really important lessons to be learned in this process when we think about African reparations, African slavery reparations. And we really have to think very carefully in future reparations efforts. What role, if any, perpetrators of state violence should have in that reparation process. And this has been a really, I think, important learning experience for us and an imperfect experience, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I sort of want to, oh, sorry. I'm sorry, let me just go back real quick before we move to the conversation, right? So it's like sometimes we be trying to do multiple things, so please forgive me for my distraction. But somebody said that this can happen all over again, right? And so even in the midst of us fighting and releasing belly of the beast, it was happening all over again. It was happening in the detention centers, the ICE detention centers and the immigrant detention centers where we saw that Ms. Wulton, who was a nurse or nurse Wulton who was in there at the time was discovering, she was actually trying to address one thing, which she was addressing COVID-19 and how they were actually treating the women and women, especially particularly women of color, which is predominantly mostly everybody in the detention center, but more so those that are of color, treating them and then that they discovered that they were getting these unnecessary hysterectomies and these false readings of cancer and things like that. And so what was happening just a couple of years ago in the detention center was reading already true for what we were going through here. So what I've always discovered, because me at city has been in hundreds of these types of discussions, is that why would you change something that works? And so if you notice it's just like cancer moving or maybe something that's moving, it just migrates, right? It migrates into a different system in which that it can hide it. So at first it started in slavery. So once that was abolished, you know what I'm saying, or either people started having a little bit more freedom, even though we know that there was so many other atrocities and Jim Crow laws and stuff like that, that targeted African-American people, but it moved from slavery to then mental health institutions where people of color, especially women of color, if they was not able to be controlled, they were deemed as feeble or crazy or insane and they was placed there. And then that's where they were able to perpetuate that. Okay, once we began to start looking into mental health facilities and then they were able to acknowledge those things that was happening there, if you notice that soon as most of the mental health detention center begin to deteriorate as to a means of addressing societal issues, then prisons begin to sprang up, especially women's prisons. So they moved it from the mental health institutions or facilities into the actual correctional facilities. And then now it's been moved from a correctional facility into a detention facility for immigrants. So if you notice that this evil is just continuously, it just moves and migrates along our land. It doesn't go anywhere until we, you know what I'm saying. And so now, you know, and then now it's evolving in another way in which we are now having to deal with reproductive justice, you know? So it's like, I know that that right there between spiritual, right? You know, different thing like that. We know America's on a divide of how we are looking at reproductive justice at this particular moment. But still all of those things play into who gets to decide who lives, who dies, who has children, who doesn't, who's worthy of medical care and who's not, right? These things is continuously perpetuating itself. And you would have thought that after over a hundred or something years of having to fight in order to get to the place where we're in 2000 and 2022, but yet it's still, it's seen like we have just within the last five or six years, we have went back into time for over a hundred years. We're almost really back in that time, right? You know what I'm saying? And then in some of the conversations that we're having. So it never really, it's never, we are not killing, we are not chopping the head off of it. We're really at this time and what we've always been doing is just dealing with the situation systematically. Like this reparations that we're dealing with right now, even though it means a lot to me, it is just a medication. It is just a medication for a larger diagnosis of a situation, you know what I'm saying? And it's enough to just like how when we holler and scream in pain, well, us as survivors have been hollering and screaming in pain and the reparations was just to calm the people down, to calm the pain down. But yet it's still nobody is really going after trying to extract the situation that's really at hand. And that's what we keep finding ourselves in. So it's like, even though like you, and there's so many other ways that this thing shows up. So I even though I know we're kind of talking about belly of the beat, but we also, like me and Cynthia, sometimes we even have our offline discussion. And we had an offline discussion, it's not the target of villainized Planned Parenthood, but we had a conversation about the pros and the cons of Planned Parenthood, it's two systems. And so we know that, so where is it that young women are now being offered the birth control peels and methods and stuff like that. But yet still we have experimental reproductive strategies, anti birth strategies, whatever, that is being pushed upon our low income, predominantly urban communities of children of color being pushed upon them with no supervision. You get what I'm saying? With no supervision. With not understanding what is the health concerns or either like, what's going on or to have that true care and wrap around for people that's on ground to advocate for those particular individuals. So these things are not just about, I know we're here to talk about Belly of the Beast, but Belly of the Beast is just a conversation starter, an eye opener in a means of mentally and spiritually and emotionally waking up the people as to like what's really going on here because when people watch Belly of the Beast, they say like, damn, this shit was happening right under our nose. Like how did, and then when you, and then when like as Erica presented in Angela presenting the film, how did we not know that 32,000 individuals over a course of time was sterilized under this federal law or mandate? How do we not know that? You know what I'm saying? And it was a lot of other institutions that got away with being a part of it. Now sometimes I out those institutions and sometimes I don't, but it was a lot of other institutions that was not just along with CDC. It's the last of many, my grandma will say, many, many facilities that's other, you know, like the Medea, many, it's been many things, but no, it's many, many other institutions that allows to contribute to the perpetuation and the continuation of these levels of crimes against humanity. You know, when we were doing the Sunshine Statute, the first one where we're just trying to take, trying to at least attempt to stop the forced and course sterilizations inside the prisons, I was being asked by many right wing radio stations if I would be a guest because they wanted to have me as a guest because they assumed I would be anti-abortion because somehow trying to stop, stop sterilizations that were coerced in their mind meant that we were setting a precedent to be able to stop access to abortion also. And I, you know, I actually accepted those invitations just so I would have a chance to be on those shows and say, no, actually you're completely wrong. We have to start seeing that prohibiting abortion and coercing people into sterilization are part of the same package. They are part of the state attempting to decide who can have a family, who's not allowed to have a family, who can have a future, who cannot have a future, who must have a future versus who can never have a future. And we have to start, you know, figuring out ways to build bridges across these sort of siloed topics around reproductive freedom and focus in a reproductive freedom, reproductive justice overall, right? So that we can get then, I think that nuanced look so that we can start intersecting racial justice into discussions of reproductive justice as well. For sure. Yeah, I was thinking as you were speaking, Kelly, and thank you so much about showing how, you know, belly of the beast and this fight to stop the legal sterilization of women who the state have confined, you know, which is another form of slavery, because you belong, your body belongs to those people. You don't have any, I mean, you can think freedom, but your body is theirs, you know? It's not much you can do if they've got your body and that's our house in this particular spirit form, right? So yeah, so the conversation, it is a conversation starter because the song says what's going on, right? And it's not like that's the only thing that's going on, it's really complex and it's complicated. We go back to 1909 looking at eugenics. There are a lot of comments, you know, with regards to some of the things you all have talked about. One question, I only saw one question with a question mark, and asked about sort of, you know, how you keep yourselves fortified, you know, emotionally and spiritually to be able to do this work because it's been a long haul kind of work and it's not going away the systems that are in place, presently perpetuate, you know, these kinds of things happening, support these kinds of things happening and, you know, it's not gonna stop right at the moment. You know, hopefully, you know, we arrest it. And also I wanna let folks know that the community sterilization memorial will be at the Ed Roberts Center in Berkeley in January 2023. And if you follow Wanda's pics.com or if you just stay in touch with myself or Shauna, we'll have the exact information once it comes up. And I'm sure on Kelly's website, it'll be there too. But we just stay in touch. So I wanna let you respond to that. Because like I said, there are not many questions, just, you know, comments that, you know, your people are here in the chat. Kelly, do you wanna handle the idea of how do you keep going or do, what do you want to do? Yeah, I'm gonna do it quick because I'm gonna slide it back to you. I was doing fine until the movie came out. I didn't realize that I had suppressed it and moved on with it. I was doing so much speaking at the time on so many different issues. So I was speaking not just on behalf of the sterilization, but I was also speaking on behalf of domestic violence in the African-American community and how services were county-wide. It was a lot of things I was already doing. But when the movie came out and I was able to see myself from that time on that deposition and even through the whole fight, it fucked me up really bad. And I crashed mentally and emotionally. And all of that anxiety, the panic, everything just resurfaced. And so it took a moment, it's taken about the last two or three years to actually process something that I never did allow myself to process, but just with surviving. And that's what we've had to do as a people. We've had to just survive a thing because it's just been one thing hitting us after another, one thing, one bullshit, one thing we have to fight. And this group of people, we have to fight it. This system shit, we got to fight it. And then we have to fight within our own family sometimes because the trauma is so bad that we end up hurting other people within the family that we're supposed to love. And so it took a moment for me to learn how to, even though I have found a voice to advocate for those things, it took me a moment to advocate for the voice for me to take care of me, to protect me, to demand to be treated and handled a certain way. You know what I'm saying? To be handled a certain way. But watching Belly of the Bee, it messed me up to see like, I was like, man, this is, that's messed up. But it allowed me to give myself the empathy and the concern and to hold me. And like, if I was to hold a sister or a whole daughter or somebody and say, baby, that's messed up what they did to you. And I had to tell myself that. I had to tell myself like, that's fucked up what they did to you. You did not deserve to go through that. You know what I'm saying? And I had to give myself the nurture and the love that was needed and necessary. But secondly, it takes a village. And I'm gonna tell you Cynthia, like right now, like, let me just say this is that we're like, right now we're in this place of where it's now Jews and blacks and Hispanics and blacks and whites and in Palestinian, it's all just all this kind of crazy stuff is going on. And in the midst of trying to find strength and liberation, the one thing that in the midst of people trying to find that liberation and that strength is to begin to not just segregate themselves but also say like, this person's been the enemy and these people been the enemy like that. So I get it. But my main support has come from Cynthia. It's come from Erica. It's come from another woman by the name of Eve Sheedy. It's come from Georgia Horton, who was a former member of mine. It's come from women who were and of Daniel Killian who were Mormons, Jewish, Catholic, you know, like all of this, you know, this stuff going on. And they are women who look white, you know what I'm saying? I wouldn't just say because they got other stuff going on but they was like, Erica's Jewish, you know what I'm saying? But she looks white. But here's the thing. It was a true like love. You get what I'm saying? It was true love where my family couldn't even give me that. Where my family still was probably dealing with their own guilt about not being what they needed to be for me in those moments or even probably they couldn't and they was busy living life or whatever. But my own family that couldn't give me that. So it was God and just touching me and strengthening me to learn how to love me. But it was also the sisterhood of all of the individuals that were handpicked to be in my life through these moments and through this lifetime that I would have never picked for myself. So here's the thing. I would never pick these people for myself. I probably would have seen Cynthia coming in and out like, okay, that's the white lady that be coming up in here to see the rest of the team, Chopper Nam and all the rest of them, right? But I would have never picked Cynthia to be my friend because I probably would have thought Cynthia didn't want to be my friend. You get what I'm saying? I would have never picked Erica but this circumstance in life brought us together and it gave me a family. You get what I'm saying? So I was able to embrace not the idea of what I wanted love to be and not the idea of the package in which I wanted love to come through. But I had to embrace what love was presenting itself at because that makes sense. And so, and it showed up in Cynthia, it showed up in Erica, it showed up in Eve, it showed up in these other people and those were the times that they were able to love me and tell me and show me through their love and their support for me, who I was when I couldn't stand to see myself in the mirror because all I saw was a broken shattered young woman that life had did that too. So I was looking at it from the brokenness and the shattered pieces of trauma but they were seeing me for the greatness of who they saw in me and what I can become. So sometimes in those times, you get to a place where you can't even care for yourself or you're not strong enough to do that for yourself. You need people around you or even to shine a light on the ability to see and recognize just like when a nurse comes into the hospital room, you know what I'm saying? You recognize the fact that you're in a state of which you cannot care for yourself. So this person is here to do that for you. That's what I had to do with the love that they have for me. So I'm just keeping it 100, you know what I'm saying? It's like, but those are the things that happen behind closed doors that if people really got your back that they'll watch you in your most vulnerable, broken moment. They won't exploit it, they won't expose it but then they'll get you straight to put you back out there so you can stand as the leader, the she-ro, the hero or whatever it is that other people may see you as. That's what they did for me. So I'm just gonna leave it at that. Yeah, I wanted to mention that Deanna Henderson is with us and wanted to ask Shauna, I don't know how we will be able to let her join the conversation. Oh, there she is, cool. Unmute yourself, unmute yourself. There you go. Hi, hi everybody. Hi Kelly, hi Cynthia, hi Wanda. I just kind of wanted to talk a little bit about my experience with Heinrich and what I went through and he made a statement to me that did not allow me to heal for a super, super long time. And I too like shut down until the belly of the beast was made. And I just figured, okay, he got away with it, you know? And who else is gonna step up and speak? And after my hysterectomy and after I finally found out about it, I went into his office for my first visit with him to check what he had done. And I asked him, why did you do this to me? You said you were gonna remove two growths. And he got up, he walked over to the door and he closed the door. And he came back and he sat down and he said, I'm tired of you pretty young long-haired girls. Coming in here, you stay here. You become a bunch of, excuse my language, hotasses. You go home, you do the wild thing, you do the nasty. You get pregnant and we gotta pay for it. Us taxpayers have to pay for it. I was in deep shock. And I'm still trying, I still question today, where did he get that kind of comfort with me to voice that? Like, I still don't understand. Like it puzzles me all the time. Like, why me? Why did you tell me that? And I don't know if he told anybody else that, but from the other people that have had the sterilizations, nobody has said anything. And so I kind of think, I feel like he felt comfortable enough to tell me that. I'm just dumbfounded over it still. And if I could have it my way, you know, the reparations, like that's part of it when I'm sorry. But my heart of hearts, we all had to go to prison and do time for what we did. Why isn't he in prison? Why isn't he in prison? He took away so much from so many women. He abused us mentally, emotionally and physically. But he's still free. But let a Native American or a Mexican or an African American do any of those three and we're locked up, locked up. I don't get it. So I'm grateful for everybody that has helped me to get the reparations and to have a voice and to be able to share the things that have gone on. You know, I'm grateful to be home and have a second chance. And if any of you guys need help with anything, like please don't hesitate. Call me, you know, call me, I'm here. Anybody wants to hear, you know, what I have to say is like, I'm more than welcome to share it. Like had I had known what I was signing up for, like I took him at face value that like he said he was going to remove these two growths. So are okay, he works for a CDCR. You know, he ought to be a little upstanding. So I didn't question it. I didn't read my paperwork. I signed it and I don't know how many other people did the same thing. They just signed it thinking they were signing up for what he was saying he was going to do. And I feel like in the heart of hearts that he thought he could play God and take that right away from us as Native American. We're life givers. Women are the only life givers on the planet and we're connected to Mother Earth. And he took that, he didn't just take that right away from me, spiritually he took from me, you know? And it hurts my heart. It hurts my heart. Granted, I was blessed to have some children before I went in, but what if I would have gotten out 10 years earlier and wanted to start another family? He took that from me and he's still walking around, you know? Yeah, it's kind of, I'm just trying to stay this real quick and just really move because we need to have like a healing circle for us, right? In which we've been trying to reach out to different and every organization kind of deal with their own set of survivors. And so what we really do need to do with in the next, like maybe within the next month or so or maybe after the holiday, at least January or sometime before we get ready to go to this memorial meeting, some memorial that we need to have a healing circle, right? But I think about the doctor and because that doctor was over there at BSTW, but our doctor was at CPWS and he was the other, he was the African-American doctor that was a part of it. It's hard to go after one particular person when they were allowed to perform the things that they were able to perform because they feel like they were under an umbrella. And not only umbrella, but also an assignment, right? You can't punish the person that carries out the assignment. You have to go after who assigned them. So like as you look at the, as you guys were able to see the movie and that's why we were trying to get people to understand that some of this stuff was inside of CDC policy to be able to perform these sterilizations. Right. Yeah. Could I just add in a couple of things when this, thank you for coming out today and sharing. Just thank you so much. And I think that higher up actors in the Department of Corrections and also the state legislature emboldened doctors like Heinrich and other doctors too. I wanna point out that like, we had to focus on kind of a boogeyman for the narrative arc of the film. But the sterilizations at the belly of the beast film was able to uncover, we uncovered about 1400 questionable sterilizations, questionable in terms of consent over the last 20 years. And those sterilizations were performed at 13 different hospitals, including two UC teaching hospitals. So this was systemic in the medical profession. The doctors were not only not prosecuted, they were not even disciplined by the medical review board, which is the licensing body and the state. And the reason that we were given for why they weren't disciplined was that they had been encouraged to do these sterilizations. They had been given a special supposed letter, although we were never able to verify and see that letter. So either they were just protecting those folks or they really did provide them a letter encouraging them to start doing sterilizations during labor and delivery and other medical procedures. They were being encouraged to break the law and then they were protected once they did it. So this was really, it took us 20 years to get, 25 years really to get to where we are today in part because there were so many high up officials who were part of this on a systemic level. They were part of this abuse and the perpetuation of it and the justification of it, right? And thinking that it was normal and reasonable. And even now, I mean, with these discussions, Kelly and I have been talking a lot of different places and because I'm the lawyer, I frequently get sort of sent out to talk to sort of white professionals about this topic. And so I've been talking to a lot of doctors and I've been talking to residency training programs that are training the next generation of OBGYN. So the next generation of gynecologists and over and over again, these residents who are about to be the future doctors, medical leaders are saying things like, oh, wow, I didn't realize that protections against forced sterilization wasn't just some extra loophole that we put low income people through. I didn't realize that there was a reason. Like they had no knowledge of eugenics. They had no knowledge of sterilization abuse. They are not being taught about it in school. In fact, they're being told by their higher up folks that it's just a nuisance that they have to have these protective regulations in place. So it's so important for us to make sure that this history is not lost, right? And to make sure that people really understand the harms of population control that are ongoing. So thank you so much for attending, Deanna, and look forward to seeing you at some of these healing spaces that we need to create for survivors because you don't wanna survive, you wanna thrive and get beyond this. Well, you can't really get beyond it because it happened, but experience that joy and happiness because you are free. So thank you so much. And I'm sure we'll see each other. Well, we are kind of like running into your time now. And we don't want to keep you beyond your comfort zone. So I just wanted to, before I give you all the last word and then Shonda comes back on, I wanted to mention, I don't know if you're familiar with Maat. And Maat is a comedic symbol for justice, the good justice. And there are 42 laws. And a lot of people, they read over the laws every day at the beginning of the day and then they remind themselves at the end, like, was I honest today? You know, did I offer forgiveness today? Some of those kinds of things. And I just wanted to read what's on this bookmark that my daughter made for me. My art became identified with truth, righteousness, justice, order, balance, harmony and reciprocity. In some respects, it helps sway over all forms of rightness, including goodness and joy. That is the African, as the Africans called it, the expansion of the heart. Maat is a term with numerous meanings in the literature, but all of these meanings tend to point in one direction. And one of the concepts of Maat is like the foundation of human life. You know, the promotion of sanity, order, balance, harmony, peace and justice among human beings. And that's a lot, Malefica Sante 2011, that's where the quote came from. But Maat is like a bird and you look at the feather, justice is not blind in the African cosmology. It's not blind. And then the feather, you know, so the feather hangs on the balance. And if your deeds are lighter than the feather, that's what you're going for, right? Doing no harm, literally. So I just want, I wanted to sort of leave everyone with the idea of Maat, you know, truth and justice and reciprocity and treating people as you want to be treated and holding people in our hearts and wishing each other, you know, love and joy and happiness, not just with words, but what we do to facilitate that. So I just want to offer that and thank you both so much for joining us. And I wanted to give you an opportunity to have the last word before Shana comes back on and closes the program officially. Someone, I'm just gonna do this last little thing right here. Someone, I think Zaire said, can these incarcerated victims and their families ever be free of the systematic abuse? So my thing was none of us are truly free. We all have been held hostage and victimized by power, hate and oppression, but spiritually we can be free. That freedom that comes within that cannot be penetrated without permission, right? And that's what you see when you visit, when you go, and I think Cynthia has the privilege of being on the other side of the wall and she sees the love and the joy and the singing and us doing this and making scenes the love that we have is that this incarcerated body, like our body is incarcerated, right? But internally, we find things to survive. We find joy, we find love, we find peace in order to keep surviving, to keep going and to move through, right? And so I have come to the conclusion as I could see, after you have been victimized in such ways, the lens of the way you look at things in life is now, there is the naivety, the innocence of God. So I can see systematically the patterns that happen in television and music and just the slightest thing. So for me, I have to find that freedom within. So that's my thing is that there's a power, so I just wanna in my stand that there's a power that's within us, that we are in control of, that we own, that no one can take from us, right? And it allows us to endure, it allows us to persevere, it allows us to rise up and make purpose out of the most painful situations. And that is what I will say that in the moment that we are in right now, that we have to live it, we have to, I think it's the time from the pandemic to now that we have been, there's a call to know ourselves in that manner. There's a deeper call for us to get back in touch with that peace of us, which makes us human and separated from animals. When someone doesn't have that peace, then they're not connected to that peace, they can do things like this with no sense of consciousness as an animal would do. You get what I'm saying? So a savage animal. So if they don't have that spiritual peace in them, there's no way that they can connect to humanity. So you know what I'm saying? So I just wanna, I know that sounds a little bit off, but that's where I'm at right now with just saying that right now it's like, we have to be in this phase of understanding the higher self of us in this moment. You get what I'm saying? Because right now we're in a space where we're not getting better. We're not getting better right now. So we're gonna have to find a way to find our community and also find a way to survive that comes from within. That's what I'm saying. Cynthia, I just thought of something. I forgot I've got these notes I've been writing as you were speaking, but I wanted to mention that I knew Chopper and I wanna say Ashay and I got a chance to visit her before she passed and she was free and she was happy. But she was sick because she was a victim of the horrible, can you even call it a medical system? Because it doesn't exist around cancer and just letting it grow and just take over her whole body which was really unfortunate. And also I wanted to mention that I met Georgia because I was part of a visiting team so I got a chance to go in, visit sisters and visit women as a part of CCWP on the sister-to-sister visiting team and Georgia and a girlfriend was happening. Great program and I'm so happy. She's been free for a minute down with a sister burden, her place in the Los Angeles County doing great work. So I wanted to mention those names. You know, I didn't get to answer the question about how to keep doing this work. And I wanted to just say that I kept doing it, keep doing this work because everything I've learned about loyalty and dignity and perseverance and keeping a sense of self as well as keeping a higher purpose that really is the key to keeping going. Everything I've learned about that I've learned from people in prison. And it's been an incredible honor to do this work as a comrade to folks inside. So, and thank you Kelly, I learn from you every day including today, thank you. Well, thank you both for your work and I hope you've been able to read the chat or you can save it and put it in your feel good binders because you got a lot of support here. Shana, there you are. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you all. I mean, we're all very honored to have you and I think you're all inspiration for what we as regular people can do to help, you know, fight these systems that seem to continue to put us down. So thanks again, Kelly Dillon, Cynthia Chandler and again, Wanda Sabir. Your work is amazing and you can check out some of her other wombfulness gathering programs on our YouTube page. Several of them are wonderful for healing. Thanks again for this program everyone and check us out on sfpl.org. Pick up the movie or the film at our library and registrants, your link will be good till November 19th. Thanks again, everybody and Ashe.