Interview With Dr. Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson & Mandisa Thomas

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/03/03

*The interview conducted September 18, 2023.*

Mandisa Thomas is the Founder of Black Nonbelievers, Inc. One of, if not the, largest organization for African-American or black nonbelievers or atheists in America. The organization is intended to give secular fellowship, provide nurturance and support for nonbelievers, encourage a sense of pride in irreligion, and promote charity in the non-religious community. 

Dr. Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson is a Registered Doctoral Psychologist with expertise in Counselling Psychology, Educational Psychology, and Human Resource Development. He earned qualifications in Social Work too. Duly note, he has five postsecondary degrees, of which 3 are undergraduate level. His research interests include memes as applied to self-knowledge, the evolution of religion and spirituality, the aboriginal self’s structure, residential school syndrome, prior learning recognition and assessment, and the treatment of attention deficit disorder and suicide ideation. In addition, he works in anxiety and trauma, addictions, and psycho-educational assessment, and relationship, family, and group counselling.

Here Mandisa and Dr. Robertson talk about contexts for Indigenous and African American freethinkers.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: To frame the conversation today with backgrounds and descriptions, the idea is to get some insight into the experiences, the narratives, the views, the needs, the communities, the individuals who are either coming from an African-American religious background into an atheist non-religious freethought forefront and similarly those individuals in a Canadian context coming from an indigenous background and believing less and less in the supernaturalistic elements of some indigenous culture. Indigenous in Canada has a tripart type meaning, and it means Métis, First Nations, and Inuit. They have different terms and different meanings in different contexts, but formally, in Canada, it doesn’t mean that. 

So, to start, as an overview, what are the challenges and needs of individuals in the African American atheist community and the indigenous freethought community?

Mandisa Thomas: Well, I will say that for the African-American community, there is a need for more resources as far as tangible because the church’s perception is that it provides a much-needed community resource as far as gathering, as far as representation, as far as what it needs to be institutionally represented in black communities and this is only true because of the historical aspect of things and also how most black and African-Americans in the United States became religious to begin with. I think there is a need for better information, more education, and tangible resources to help organizations like Black Nonbelievers continue to offer more financial resources for people who can have spaces across the United States. It doesn’t necessarily mean like churches but to have either similar or the same type of economic foundation and structure to where we can sufficiently help people to help themselves. 

This takes place in several forms, whether we can better connect people to resources where they can find clinical help or make it easier to live their everyday lives without so much religious pressure and overtones. I would say that that is the primary need and also a focus. There’s also a need for more people to get more involved in the spaces of racial justice and economic justice so that there’s more representation in non-religious voices when it comes to issues like reparations when it comes to issues like reproductive justice that do impact people of colour more so. So, I mean, there’s a lot that’s needed, but I would say that the primary need is more resources for us to do our work. 

Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson: Scott, can you refresh my memory? What was your question again?

Jacobsen: What are the needs and challenges?

Robertson:  Okay. I’m going to reference our Aboriginal circle. I didn’t explain in the introduction that the program I’m involved with has various branches. One of them is an Aboriginal circle looking at these, and I’m a member of that circle.

Jacobsen: You’re speaking about the one I’m part of, correct?

Robertson: Well, Scott, you are as well, that’s true too. Now, the issue here as we see it is that, and I agree with much of what Mandisa was saying there about the challenge of religion or religious thinking to our emancipation. We had an elder, he’s still part of our circle, an Anishinaabe elder, who did a wonderful article earlier this year outlining the issue. He gave up his pipe. Now, the pipe is a very important part of ceremonies, and he was called on to do ceremonies in his communities as he was trained to do. However, increasingly, it was associated with a religious way of thinking. So, he felt he was being fake because people interpreted it as an alternative to science, reason, and rationality. 

I’ll give you an example. Another member of our circle is non-Aboriginal; he’s a member of The New Enlightenment project who is not Aboriginal and not part of the Aboriginal circle. He developed the theme that we are all of African descent because, more than a decade ago, he was invited to speak at a university in Texas. He heard that Texans were a bit rightwing and that they’re Republicans down there, I guess. So, he developed the theme of this talk that any racist ideology, given that we all are descended from African origins, is untenable, philosophically untenable. He presented this same theme when he got back to his university in Canada for a graduate philosophy class, and two members of the class took exception because they said that the Aboriginal way of knowing was that the Creator placed Aboriginal people on Turtle Island.

Our member, said, “Well, let’s have a class debate on this, and I’ll pick two debaters, and your side can pick two debaters, and people can make up their minds.” No, that was not good enough. The issue was brought before the dean, and there was an inquiry; he was not fired but did not have tenure and was not re-hired. That was his last semester teaching at Wilfrid Laurier University. From that, we can see this is a religious way of thinking. A Creator gave a particular part of the world to certain people; therefore, it historically belongs to them. Frankly, I find that religious thinking like that has become a problem within Aboriginal communities in Canada, at least. I can’t speak for outside of Canada. However, there is a struggle between those who would like to see the world through a secular, scientific, and rational lens and a resurgent religion. In an article I wrote; I called this new religion Native Spirituality because it’s a set of beliefs held to be true irrespective of time and context beyond the issue of evidence. So, this is an issue we are dealing with here in Canada, and this is a reason for our organization.

Jacobsen: So, the challenge is having an evidentiary basis for the beliefs held within the indigenous communities within Canada. I’m not speaking outside because contexts will be different. However, in this particular case, I’m aware of institutional backing to probably benevolent purposes to prevent an individual from teaching boilerplate evolutionary history: we’re all one race, one species, one humankind. So, how does this get extended in the indigenous communities when individuals are bold enough to challenge some of the supernatural or historical beliefs that are not based on evidence? How is this taken when individuals within Aboriginal communities within Canada are challenging those supernatural assumptions?

Robertson: Not well. In some ways, I think we’ve regressed. I was Director of Life Skills for the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College in the 1980s. In the 1970s and 1980s, affirmative action meant something different from what affirmative action means now. Affirmative action meant that you look at a situation, study why the situation is there, and take action to rectify it. So, for example, a situation we studied was why there were very few Aboriginal graduates from universities in Canada at that time. I went to the University of Saskatchewan, and you could count the people who graduated of Aboriginal ancestry at that time on your fingers; they were few. So, we took a look and found that one of the major things that was happening was that potential university students  coming underprepared. We, being the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, were affiliated with the University of Regina, at the time. SIFC later became First Nations University.. The issue was that potential students were not coming with the needed skills. 

So, my job was created as Director of Life Skills to teach university life skills to students from remote communities. However, we look at all Aboriginal communities, including Métis. We were also teaching basic literacy because there was a gap there. This resulted in  an extra year tacked onto university education, but we got a lot of people graduating, so it was a huge success. Some students would ask, “Why do we always have to become more like them every semester? Why can’t they become more like us?” What they were talking about was those habits of mind that were formed during the Enlightenment, and in my book, Scott, you will know this: I argued that the self didn’t arrive with the enlightenment that occurred in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. No, the self is that mental map that we have that we can take ourselves as an object and place ourselves in remembered pasts and possible futures and different situations; this allows for a whole lot of rational thinking and development that the self has been on the planet for eons possibly as late as three millennia ago. In some form, a lot older than that, there’s… I don’t need to get into the archaeological evidence, but parts of the self can be traced back 50,000 years.

So, the self is what the Enlightenment did, and the way I like to put it is the Enlightenment was going to happen somewhere on the planet. The conditions happened to be right in Europe at that particular time because the mechanisms for keeping the self-repressed were weaker for various reasons. So, we did have an enlightenment process that resulted in a scientific revolution and a commercial revolution, and there were negatives there. However, there were a lot of positives, and overall, we’ve had a lot of technological progress. So, when students ask why we always have to become like them, they wonder why we couldn’t stay in what is romanticized as an idyllic life that maybe existed a thousand years ago.

One of the challenges I had with people who would like to live off the land, and I think we’ve all fantasized about, is to go up North. I’m from Northern Saskatchewan, Mandisa, a wild country. It’s mainly lakes, trees, fish, and moose, and try living off it now. It’s not the same as it was even 150 years ago. So, we can’t live in that world, but I don’t even know if we should go back to it because a lot of good can come with the knowledge bases we’ve managed to develop as a civilization. So, the issue then is not us becoming like them; the issue is developing, tying, and indigenizing those skills. Indigenization means taking the technologies here and tying them to a culture so that it feels like we own it; we take it as our own, which is the challenge. That is not something that we have done successfully.

I’m doing a workshop in Toronto in about a month. On this, is using the medicine wheel to further these enlightenments. The medicine wheel is a very flexible method of depicting holism. I understand 343 stone medicine wheels have been discovered, and the Great Plains area stretches from the Gulf of Mexico to Northern Saskatchewan. This is a way of tying the culture to the technology and owning it because science is not Western; it’s universal, and what we’re challenging is the idea that there are different ways of knowing, and that sounds good, but the concept of ways of knowing is being used to say “Well, if you’re Aboriginal, you believe things or you see things this way” Well, no, I’m sorry. That’s preventing discourse and growth in thought, which we can only get through dialogue and objective means, and we’ve been losing that, I think, to some degree in some circles. Sorry for being longwinded.

Jacobsen: For Mandisa, the need for financial contribution and sustainability of community and organizations is something that African-American religious organizations have through tithes, zakat, and so on. These continual contributions of finance make them more sustainable. As far as I know, have something of an equivalency to that in any of the secular communities, let alone the African-American secular community, as well the imposition and the weight of religion and this is something you taught me, especially for African-American women coming out of the church. It’s quite an issue because you’re giving up a lot of support structure, not just leaving the church and the god concept. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Thomas: Absolutely, Scott. So, the challenge with the church being supported through tithes and donations is that it’s often to the detriment of families. It’s like most African Americans in the United States; there’s a lot of economic spending power, but as far as wealth, there is still a severe wealth gap that we are dealing with. We still deal with economic disparities even though there has been progress over the years. Much of the sustainability for the churches and these institutions often comes from common working people, which isn’t always to the community’s benefit. Now, I will say that what would help institutionally as far as sustainability for families, individuals, and black-led institutions like Black Nonbelievers is the push for reparations. In the United States, globally, there was a push for economic reparations for the descendants of the enslaved. Where some families and companies benefited economically from slave labour, they profited from slave labour. And when slavery ended, none of that transferred over to the formerly enslaved or their descendants.

So, there is a huge push to put reparations into law, which would significantly be beneficial for many African-American families. That would give much more of an edge that was denied before institutionally because you have to remember that historically, many measures were put into place that prevented African-American progress, that prevented educational opportunities, financial opportunities and also which fed like a school-to-prison pipeline or which criminalize African-Americans more than anyone else. So, these are institutional factors that we have to take into consideration. However, we also look at the church and its representation of our communities and where that financial support is now because of the Advent of the Prosperity Gospel of the 1970s. The Advent of the Prosperity Gospel encouraged more people to look to the church for miracles and put their trust in these institutions that weren’t necessarily returning on the investment. It was providing emotional support for the time being or in a time that people felt they needed it, but ultimately, it took advantage of a lot of people and, working class and poor people in the United States especially.

So, there is this perception of the church being this support system for the black community when the black community has been pretty much supporting the church more than anything else. Again, considering the disparities we still face, it has not always been to our benefit as a community. So, I think when people come out of the church, especially in African-American communities… there are a lot more people who will utilize these communities and these organizations. However, there is a need for more philanthropic support because most, especially black members of Black Nonbelievers, they’re able to chip in a few dollars when they can and just try to get to the point where we can impress upon people that the support and the community and the resources that we provide are worth supporting to the point where we can continue to support others. I think that some other larger secular organizations have had that support. 

If more people consider leaving foundational gifts to organizations like Black Nonbelievers, as others have done for other organizations, that would be very helpful. We’re still a very young organization, so there’s still time to build on that, but I think because many religious institutions do the same, they encourage their members to leave legacy gifts to their churches. So, trying to get more of our members to do the same would be beneficial, but we’re not doing so from a place of guilt or manipulation; we’re doing so to hopefully encourage people to continue to leave a legacy for the future of secularism and within the black non-religious community and then black communities as well. So, it’s about leaving; it is about preparing for our future and how we will have an organization that provides educational and support resources that result in institutional growth and turn around many of these other factors.

Jacobsen: Something coming to mind linking some of the references and the responses is the idea of the life skills development that Lloyd took on board decades ago as the Director of that program in Saskatchewan to help with using an empirical method to gather data, do an analysis, and then come up with recommendations based on that data and analysis. That’s how to do it because, as he noted, there was a success. Many in atheist, agnostic, and humanist communities will typically have higher educational attainment or know more about religions and other topics in general. It has me thinking that the disposable income of individuals in our communities, in particular, should be more well-set to make some contributions because many organizations typically get a $50 membership fee for the year, and that’s the contribution. 

As far as I can tell, they could go a bit farther than that. It’s just a matter of giving a reason for the impetus to do that. I think atheists, agnostics, and humanists don’t do fervour well; I think that comes with the package. So, the continual renewal on a Sunday or a Saturday or Friday religious service to give money or 10% of income isn’t necessarily something that would be expected except maybe something that might happen in the Sunday Assembly if it does that. Do you think there’s some kind of enticement that could be given within African-American free-thought communities or indigenous free-thought communities? However, I know the contexts are a little bit different on these things because there are, for instance, former organizations, as Dan Barker notes, for the African-American secular community as opposed to the indigenous free thought community, which is still unformed inchoate at the moment.

Thomas: Yeah, if I may just respond to that quickly. You find that most religious people give to their churches out of a sense of obligation. It is their ticket into heaven, so giving for a reward tends to be, as Lloyd said before, as far as religious thinking could also be considered religious thinking. I caution that simply wanting to give just to get something back could result in division, and we’ve seen this historically in movements that speak for liberation and justice. Unfortunately, that can get in the way, but I think the enticement or the incentive again, well, I know for Black Nonbelievers, we now co-sponsor a scholarship, right? We want to develop more programming that helps people tangibly if they need connections to education and other connections. I would say that that piece is important. However, considering the injustices that have been committed against several people of colour where our ancestors were robbed of resources, I think that it’s important to have that conversation about economic justice. This is not to point the blame at anyone but simply to point out that there were folks, our ancestors, who were robbed of the ability to have this education and these life skills to where they could be successful.

So, in addition to providing them, there also does need to be reparations, and I think that as a community that does gather information as a community that prides itself on evidence, these are not unreasonable things to look at, especially for communities that have been marginalized. So, a lot more work needs to be done as far as looking beyond the educational aspect. There need to be those institutional factors that can incorporate institutional reparations or repair some sort of reparative justice for those communities who were denied it.

Jacobsen: And like you mentioned the overall emancipation question or issue before us earlier in one of your responses, do you consider religious thought or Dogma with a religious flavour as the main impediment within indigenous communities in Canada to more free existence?

Robertson:  I think what Mandisa has been talking about has been the standard of Christianity, and there are many reasons why people are religious or have historically identified with religion. One of them is to gain answers; some do so through supernatural beliefs,  directed morality and that kind of thing. There is another very important aspect of religion that has to do with community, and perhaps what has happened and why is religion so important in the United States and black communities? Mandisa, you’ve already mentioned that it has built and preserved a sense of that community. In indigenous Canadian culture, it’s a little different. I think the majority of Aboriginal people in Canada are probably still Christian. There is one book called Reservations Are for Indians; it’s before your time, Scott. It was written in the early 1970s by Heather Jane Robertson and is about the community of Norway House in Northern Manitoba. One of the things she pointed out is that if you added up all the numbers  for all the religious groups that had members in their community, the combined membership was seven times the population of Norway House. What that meant was people were signing up for all the religions if they could, and one of the benefits is that if the religious group… and most of them were started by missionaries, they would help out with finances while you got a little extra, but there’s another powerful thing. Theistic people are all saying that each has  the way to heaven, and we can’t tell which one is true, so we’re going to join all of them and make sure we get there. Sounds rational to me. 

The issue, though, now is not Christianity in Aboriginal communities; that is an issue, but it’s not   the primary issue. The militant issue in Aboriginal communities now is another form of religion which we could call a secular religion. I’ll give you an example because earlier I mentioned the medicine wheel, and in the medicine wheel there are all kinds of ways of creating a medicine wheel; it represents wholeness, but of the medicine wheels that I talked about, two of them are divided in 28 ways, and we don’t know what each of the divisions represented because they’re like 600 years old. There’s nobody around that to explain it to us. Other medicine wheels have no divisions but are in the middle, so the medicine wheel is a very flexible way of looking at holism. It’s got a lot of potential there. However, in the religious forms, there’s something called ‘the’ medicine wheel, and it’s divided into four quadrants, which stand for physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional. So, suppose you believe in this medicine wheel that has been promoted as the medicine wheel. In that case, you’ll note that the physical is one element, but you have to work on the spiritual, and the definition of spiritual involves a belief in things not seen; it’s religion.

So, there are people who believe in the Creator I talked about earlier, but the religious thinking has been secularized, but it’s still there. Stephen Pinker, in 2003, noted that a new proto-religion had developed, with three pillars –  the myth of the Ghost in the Machine. That’s sort of like a soul. Then there’s the myth of The Blank Slate that the culture around us  creates the entirety of who we are, which means we can be recreated differently by changing the culture. The third myth was the myth of The Noble Savage, that life was idyllic 700 years ago, and everybody was living in harmony with nature, and nobody went hungry, and people lived in full equality and all that. I can tell you I studied this, talked to Elders, and worked on this; it’s not true. 

Mandisa, you talked about slavery. Well, slavery has been common in, I think, pretty much all cultures and that includes Aboriginal cultures historically. So, what are the attributes? One of the great developments of the modern era is the abolition, more so than ever before, and the rejection of slavery. So, now when we hear that clothes, for example, are made in what is effectively child slave labour in Bangladesh and  we say just because it’s cheap, don’t buy it; it’s made with slave labour. We have that moral ethic now. That’s  now ingrained in our modern cultures, and I think that’s a positive we developed. No, things were not idyllic five or 600 years ago. There were problems then, too; there was exploitation, there was war, there was disease, and there was misery. We need to use our modern rational means to empirically investigate problems and develop plans to overcome those problems. That’s the objective of the organization I represent. 

Jacobsen: Are there any questions that either of you would like to ask one another? Mandisa can go first if you’d like.

Thomas: Let me see. How successful has your organization been in doing this work, especially in representing the indigenous people of Canada?

Robertson: Not very. The organization is not primarily Aboriginal. We do havey Aboriginal members, but in terms of addressing the enlightenment, I’m afraid the question that was asked when I was with the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College is, why do we have to become like them? The answer to that has been more recently, and this has to do with the Proto religion that Pinker talked about: “Well, we shouldn’t have to be like them. We should be able to have our economies and cultures, and it should be fully funded.” And so, I hope it doesn’t go in that direction when you talk about reparations. I want to see money there for all disadvantaged, regardless of race, to help us all come together. I’m concerned that we’re being divided by race and that there’s a sense of entitlement. I’m afraid that’s affected Aboriginal people, in Canada at least, and that is okay. We do not have to participate; if we do participate in the modern economy, it will be on our terms, and we should be funded. So, we have a $6 billion-a-year Aboriginal industry in Canada doing the funding. There are reparations already, and I’m not sure it’s making a society where we could all contribute and progress together. Instead, it’s building a kind of a set of silos where each silo has certain entitlements and that somebody should provide for that. 

Jacobsen: Lloyd, do you have any questions for Mandisa?

Robertson: I think it was implied in my last answer, and that is okay. When you’re talking about reparations, you mentioned it several times, and you said because of the history of black slavery, there’s something old here. How will it be used to ensure that the people in the communities receiving it are using it to enter a world of enlightened equality?

Thomas: Well, that is up to the legislation and the people working on it, and that is what they’re working on now. Of course, I disagree with you about the sense of entitlement. It’s not about entitlement. If you have known anything about the history of enslavement at all, which, of course, yes, historically has been, the enslavement is nothing new. It is common throughout the world, but when you look at the transatlantic slave trait and how it has impacted black people across the world, which is called the diaspora, the scattering of Africans across the world and how their descendants have been adversely impacted. Others have been made rich from their labour; we cannot dismiss that as rational, evidence-based, and more enlightened human beings. Yes, we must consider that not just as a tragedy but as a world tragedy. We are talking about something that changed the global economy. Suppose the funds help more disadvantaged African Americans find a home and establish college tuition for their children or themselves. In that case, I think the legislation can make provisions to do that. That is what is being pushed through the United States government now in many forms, but just having the resources to do that. It implies that just being given money could be considered antiblackness, and there’s this presumption. I’m not saying that this is intentional, but I think the idea that these people will not spend it on what they should be considered a bit presumptive.

So, I think caution should be placed in that, but several people are relying on reparations and the inequitable funding for those of us who are already doing the hard work. Many folks are already doing work who do not get the resources needed for several institutional factors, and no one is asking for a handout. I think there’s a cartoon of what it means to be equitable, and everyone is given the boxes or the step stools, but some people still can’t see as they’re not as tall, but being given enough step stools to be able to everyone who has the same view and the same access is what’s important here. I think when we look at it, it doesn’t just impact the United States because even though there were a number of enslaved people who escaped to Canada in the period of the time that slavery was legal in the United States, this impacts the descendants of the enslaved throughout the world.

So, this is sort of a global movement. However, in the United States, there was more of a push because of again the fact that there were companies and families that benefited and generated their wealth through slave labour and that were never compensated, especially once slavery ended to those who were enslaved. And so, there does need to be more of a deep dive into that. I think some provisions can be made to ensure the future for our children and everyone because this could set an example for Indigenous people here in the United States. I mean, even though they have provisions for casinos and as such, the way many Indigenous people live here in the United States is still very much below the poverty line, which needs to change. So, this could also set a good example for other marginalized groups. 

Jacobsen: If I may, we’re just about to run out of meeting time. So, final statements: either can start, and we’ll go from there.

Thomas: Yeah, this is definitely an ongoing discussion that requires much-needed dialogue and much-needed solutions. I think that we are able to put our heads together and work towards those solutions to ensure a better future for all of us.

Robertson: I appreciate this discussion and agree that we need more discussions. There is a diversity of thought, and a part of my background, Mandisa, is that I’m also a psychologist and haven’t met a bad person. I met people who have different ideas as to what goodness is. Al Capone thought he was a public benefactor. We need to reach out to each other and find that goodness, including that goodness which is in part of some of those religious people we’ve been talking about as well, because everyone has that spark within them, and we need to reach that spark and talk to it.

Jacobsen: Mandisa and Lloyd, thank you for your time today. 

Thomas: Thank you, Scott.

Robertson: Thank you.

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