December 11

Abolitionist Profile

Morning Star Gali is a proud member of the Ajumawi band of the Pit River Tribe in Northeastern California. She serves as the Director of Indigenous Justice and has served for 16 years as the California Tribal and Community Liaison for the International Indian Treaty Council, dedicated to advancing the sovereignty and self-determination of Indigenous Peoples.  Before returning to her ancestral homelands to work for her Tribe, Gali spent over two decades in the Bay Area, volunteering and advocating on behalf of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated Indigenous people through grassroots, Indigenous-led organizations.

She gives voice to the abolitionist imagination that undergirds her work and the mission of Indigenous Justice, the organization she helped found: we are building a powerful movement of system-involved Native peoples inside and outside institutions working to end the centuries-long imprisonment of our people, ancestors, relatives, and land. We are working to end the incarceration of living native peoples in jails, prisons, and group homes across the state, to end the incarceration of our Salmon relatives impacted by dams on our rivers, and to end the incarceration of our ancestors’ skeletons locked away in basements of universities. We are doing this through developing powerful indigenous leaders and communities and organizing with them to transform the systems, structures, and stories that keep us all imprisoned both physically and spiritually.

Prayer

With the transforming power of love, come Adonai.
In systems never meant for our survival, come Adonai.
With revealing and refining fire, come Adonai.
In the daily practice of abolition, come Adonai.  Amen.