Renee Good was MURDERED Yesterday
Trump’s Desire to Shoot Protesters Is Our New Reality
I am writing this from Mexico City, and we are still processing this awful news happening back home in Minneapolis.
Renee Good was a 37 year-old mother and Minneapolis community member. She was killed by federal ICE agents just blocks away from our Indigenous Food Lab kitchen on Chicago and Lake Streets. Also, just blocks away from where George Floyd was murdered in 2020 at 38th and Chicago. This news reopens the wounds of ongoing state violence, lies, grief, and the organizing that follows when the state decides whose lives are expendable and whose are important. There is no justification for murder and SILENCE IS NOT AN OPTION.
We are here in Mexico visiting our amazing neighbors and relatives, working alongside the zero-waste restaurant Baldío and their nonprofit partner Arca Tierra, learning from their farmers, chefs, and land defenders who show what it looks like to feed people without extracting from the earth. We are sharing meals, stories, and the work behind our new book Turtle Island, which imagines a future rooted in Indigenous foodways, responsibility to land, and a borderless sense of belonging across this continent. Connecting as humans who care and Making the Americas Borderless Again.
Travel has a way of opening your eyes when you let it. Mexico has done that for me more than once.
Back in 2007, I was living in Nayarit and finding connections with the Wixárika (Huichol) community. I was early in my own understanding of Indigenous foods and culture and I was listening more than speaking. What I witnessed there did not feel foreign. Our connection was through corn, through animal deities, through relationship and duty to our environments and Mother Earth. The shared understanding that food is not separate from land, spirit, or responsibility. That time in San Pancho, NAY cracked something open in me and showed me that Indigenous knowledge is not confined by borders, and that the connections between our peoples run deeper than the lines drawn by colonizers.
I think about that often when I think about reading Che Guevara’s thoughts in my youth, whose political awakening also came through travel. As he traveled the continent of South America, he saw the same oppressions repeating themselves. Indigenous communities and rights being dispossessed. Governments allowing the extraction of their own lands to enrich outsiders. He came to see Latin America as one body divided by artificial lines that made exploitation easier and solidarity harder, and he knew something had to change.
That insight resonates now, standing here, while my thoughts keep focusing on my family at home in the north.
Back to Minneapolis. Back to Chicago and Lake. Back to the corner where George Floyd was murdered. And now to the news of Renee Good, who should still be with us today.
When Lies Are Louder Than Truth
Renee Good was killed in broad daylight during a federal operation, and it was caught on video. Within hours, the Trump administration moved to control the narrative, claiming self-defense and portraying her as an aggressive threat, a domestic terrorist. The video evidence shows a very different story and the truth. She was murdered, and the agent who killed her had no remorse.
This is not new. This is a pattern.
When the state uses lethal force against Black, Brown, Indigenous, or immigrant bodies, it follows with propaganda. The victim is reframed and the violence is justified. We are told to move on, to not believe what we see, but instead what they tell us.
We cannot allow that to be our reality.
During the George Floyd uprisings in 2020, Donald Trump did not hide his contempt for protesters. Senior officials later confirmed that he asked why protesters could not just be shot, even floating the idea of shooting people in the legs. We all watched Lafayette Square violently cleared so he could stage a photo shoot of himself holding a Bible.
At the time, many treated this as his normal deranged bluster. Why have we normalized his dangerous rhetoric?
Now a civilian is killed by his federal goon squad, and the administration immediately lies to justify it.
Donald Trump got his wish.
Minneapolis Knows the Playbook
Minneapolis will march. The city will stand strong and Renee’s name will be yelled out. She was GOOD.
But Minneapolis also knows what follows when movements grow powerful. The Trump regime seeks chaos because chaos gives them the permission they crave to escalate force and the permission to reframe dissent as criminal behavior. They want protests, and they want protests to become unlawful and chaotic because that will give them the path to label anybody against their agenda as domestic terrorists and enemies of the state.
That tactic is old, and we need to tread carefully with our resistance.
Mexico City, October 2nd, 1968
Being here in Mexico City makes this date in history impossible to ignore.
That day in October, just days before the 1968 Summer Olympics, students and civilians gathered peacefully at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas to protest the coming of the Summer Olympics and the amount of money being spent at the expense of the disparity of its own citizens. The authoritarian tactics of then President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz were at their height, with ongoing police brutality and the government stripping money away from education and social services (sound familiar?) The protests turned chaotic, and the Mexican government opened fire on the peaceful student protest in what became known as the Tlatelolco Massacre. They blocked off the exits, and a bloody massacre ensued. The state claimed protesters provoked the violence, but factual history shows that the Mexican government used agents disguised as protesters who triggered the chaos they needed to justify the relentless slaughter. The government claimed maybe 50 people were killed, but in reality 400+ people were gunned down, with thousands arrested and hundreds more disappeared over the followin
g days. This was all so that the government could maintain control and protect its global image as the Olympics went on.
This is the playbook for authoritarian regimes to control dissent. Manufacture disorder, blame the people, justify force, and move forward as if nothing happened. What happened yesterday in Minneapolis is setting the stage for just that situation.
The George Floyd Uprising
In Minneapolis in May of 2020, the day after the news of Mr. Floyd’s murder was announced and the video was released, going against police accounts and showing that he was intentionally murdered, I biked over to the corner of 38th and Chicago, where a massive gathering was taking place. The group organized and marched to the Third Precinct to protest the brutality and the ongoing killing of Black men by police, and the justifications that followed. The Minneapolis police were quick to respond with tear gas and rubber bullets, which only caused the next protest to grow larger in size. The first destruction of property happened when an unidentified man with an umbrella broke out the window of the AutoZone in Minneapolis across the street from the police station. Many accounts from protestors at the site described the individual who started the destruction as someone whose actions seemed designed to provoke the chaos that went on for days, burning many of the buildings down Lake Street until a curfew was called and the National Guard was sent in, and Minneapolis became a police state.
The effect was the same. The narrative shifted. The murder of George Floyd faded from center. Property damage took over the frame. The state regained permission to crack down.
This time is different, however. It is not Minneapolis against its own police department, it is now U.S. citizens against their own federal government. Tim Walz has the MN National Guard on standby and urged citizens to remember that the Guard is made up of people from MN. They are not the enemy, but we cannot trust the intentions of Trump’s Gestapo.
Protests will happen, but we need to understand what comes next.
Do Not Take the Bait
This is the moment we are in now.
The Trump regime wants massive protests that tip into chaos. It wants images it can loop endlessly on Fox News. It wants to label protesters and resistors as unlawful and un-American so it can justify more force, more surveillance, and emergency powers.
This is strategy, not assumption.
Resistance now must be disciplined, unified, and impossible to misrepresent. This does not mean being quiet. It means being loud, yet intentional.
The killing in Minneapolis is also inseparable from Trump’s agenda abroad.
At the same time federal agents are killing civilians here, our own government of the United States is escalating aggression against sovereign nations. Venezuela was the opening move. Talk of oil access followed immediately showing what they were really after. Now there are threats toward Mexico, Colombia, and even Greenland, isolating us from our allies around the world and falling right into Russia’s ideal agenda of a weakened United States and Europe.
The motive of aggression towards other nations to control their resources is consistent with our American history of extraction, the criminalization of Black bodies, the justification of the slaughter of Indigenous peoples, and the lust for land and resources. The colonial mentality still exists and its goals stay the same. Land exists to be taken. Resources exist to be extracted. Sovereignty exists only when it aligns with imperial U.S. interests.
Black and Indigenous peoples in the U.S. understand this because we have lived it for centuries. If sovereignty can be ignored abroad, it will never be safe at home.
Resistance Is Not Optional
Indigenous worldviews stand in direct opposition to the colonial mindset and logic. Land is not a commodity. Life is not expendable. The future is not something to gamble for profit.
That is why Indigenous voices matter now.
The revolution is not coming, it is here.
Now is the time to decide how we organize, how we protect one another, how we refuse to let our grief and frustration be weaponized against us.
Resistance does not have to be chaos. It is imperative that it is about coordination.
What We Do Now
We mourn Renee Good. We say her name. We refuse the lie that her death was inevitable or justified.
We march, but we do not give the state the images it wants.
We organize across movements, not in silos.
We document and record everything.
We refuse to be divided by provocation.
They want fear. We respond with coordination.
They want chaos. We respond with clarity.
They want silence. We respond with a collective and loud voice.
History will ask what we did when the corrupt Trump regime started killing U.S. citizens openly and lying loudly. When they attempted to reframe protest as domestic terrorism. When they tested their power to see how far it could go.
We do not get to choose the moment we are given. But we get to choose how we respond.
Now is the time to condemn this administration and its obvious tactics and hold those in office accountable for their actions.
Now is the time to show sympathy to those who have fallen for the manipulation and help them see that U.S. citizens are not the enemy of the U.S.
We must stand together, gather in mass, but remain focused.
Black and Indigenous people in the U.S. have not been erased despite centuries of aggression, oppression, and violence, and this same white nationalist playbook.
The desire to shoot protesters is no longer Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s wet dream, it is our new reality.
We must lean toward humanity and basic human rights for all over power, greed, and the lust for more land and oil.
What we do next matters more than ever, and we cannot take the bait.
I’ll see you at the nearest protest.
— Sean
Thank you. White liberals are having their Rodney King/George Floyd moment, as Trump is now expanding the police state to them. They'll face the same question they've always faced: Will they be good enough allies to help even themselves, or will they seek the shelter of their privilege? In Minneapolis, it's clear that Black and Indigenous voices will need to lead.
Thank you. This is a shocking time, made even worse by the fact that my state’s elected officials have committed themselves to Trump sycophancy. I keep writing letters to my Rebup senators opposing these indefensible actions, and keep receiving limp excuses from their (probably unpaid) interns. And the delusionary chaos from the top continues unabated.
But I do appreciate your work here. Thanks for keeping the focus on the outrageous excesses of these enablers and ghouls. It will take a massive turnout, from all people who find these actions unacceptable, to shift the government this coming November — but if not now, when? Your words help move people to engage.
And thanks for your amazing book about Turtle Island. I gave that as a New Year’s gift to several of my culinary friends this year — it was a massive hit!