Living in the Midwest has exposed me to harsh realities. It is the place I was told at age 13 to go back to my own people, it’s a place of a binary narrative and a place where I think about injustice every day. It’s the place where class after class of Black History made me embrace the culture of my people, the place where I found my voice and it’s the place that tries to choke me silently with judgement and echoes of silence. It’s a place where I have stood on frontlines with people who have yet to stand in solidarity with me, a place where I get brutalized for standing on frontlines and challenged by people I stand with. It’s been a place of binary language where colorism has discouraged me at times with trying to find my place at the table…a table that rarely allows me to sit without referring to me as “white” girl because of my skin complexion….It’s been a place where I have strived to be in community with people who don’t want community, a place where I have loved and lost and a place that has swallowed me as I constantly dug my way out of holes, whether I dug those holes myself or someone else dug them for me. The Midwest has been a silent institution, but the silence is loud, it has tried to erase me and continuously erase my people, it has tried to ignore the stature of a state where people approach me saying, “I want to go to Hawai’i”…..for pleasure off the back of my pain….as if they never notice the passion I have in the struggle to exist on a land occupied by colonial settlers.

I come from a land of modern-day slavery masked as an economic function where they try to convince us we need it in order for us to exist…a land where you have no regards for because paradise is where you have always wanted to go….I come from a land where people don’t care to learn about us, how colonization has affected us and attempted to erase us…time after time…I tell people everyone is complicit to erasing us, the more you don’t listen to those who are using their voices from there, the more you are complicit to erasing us…just as the voices echoing from reservations that no one listens to…Celebrate Indigenous People they say….but what does this mean to you?

To me it’s a reminder that my people have never been acknowledged in anything, not books outside of those we written (or people tryin to make a quick buck off of us), not history pertinent to its own, not psychological, religious, economic, institutional research (until recently), a reminder that all of Oceania is a place where most americans don’t acknowledge or know anything about of…a place where tribes, aborigines and original people exist only amongst ourselves, we recognize ourselves and we value each other…and we value those who don’t value us…it’s in our upbringing…even when we have been silenced for century after century we still breathe the air of our deities and connect with the land…a land that reminds us that even when we’re forgotten, silenced and facing erasure, we stand and fight recognizing those of us who stand in the face of genocide….there’s something to say about historical genocide but remember, your silence is part of the history that is violent…