Place, Ecology and Homeland
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I’ve Been Trained to Kill You
This is a poem I wrote during a course with Susan Raffo on land, land connection, and repair. It illuminates the complexity in us as colonizers, the way we’ve been trained to be predators, and the work of seeing ourselves in each other and in land as we unravel from…
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Ancestors of Place
I feel strongly that until we do the work of acknowledging, reconciling with, and working to heal the harm in our lineages, we continue carrying that harm into our own lives. There are also well ancestors in all of our lineages—even if very far back in time—that are worthy of…
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Widdershins
Widdershins weaves indigenous technologies of story, dream, pilgrimage, and timekeeping to ritually restore balance.
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Re-membering Oak-loving Ancestors for the Protection and Return of Sacred Land
This sacred site of the Apache People is now owned by a private mining company after a federal land transfer in 2026. The company plans to mine deep under Oak Flat in a process that would cause the land to collapse and leave a crater nearly two miles wide. Apache…
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Building Belonging with Land and Place: Learning Relationships and Responibilities
In this essay, I write about moving from Southern California to the Pacific Northwest alongside the question of how to build right relationship with land/place. I describe the ways in which I found myself wanting to reach for belonging, but not wanting to replicate the settler logics of my ancestors…
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Ancestral Palimpsests
Ancestral work is powerful in that it can address the roots of both patriarchy and racism. It’s as if our long-ago ancestors hold out their arms to us, fastening us back to our Mother Earth–umbilicus, to each other and the entire web of life. This is the remembering and reintegration…
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The Woven World
This poem seeks to excavate lost practices of relationship to spirit, land, and lineage. It explores the many languages we have: cultural, somatic, unconscious, and numinously sourced. These expressions lift us out of the cultural poverty of displaced and colonizing peoples, reminding us of ways of being where cultural power…
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Motherland
Reconnecting with the strengths and struggles within the ancestral homelands of settler colonialists is a critical step in healing the systems of violence and power over we have adopted and used to cause great destruction in America. But can you go home again? This non-fiction essay explores my quest to…