a land acknowledgement for mo/u/rning

I woke up this morning under blankets in a bed in a house all of which are made of materials from “I don’t know where” – all of which currently occupy stolen Tiwa lands. 

I looked at content on my minicomputer made of minerals extracted from US military-occupied, colonized lands often by enslaved colonized children.

The content that told me about these injustices is stored in computers made of minerals from those same lands which are cooled w water extracted from the Rio Grande & San Juan, the waters of Pueblo and Diné. 

I feed my cats whose ancestors are from “I don’t know where” but “certainly not here”.

They eat dry foods harvested from exploited animals, processed by exploited workers, which profit Nestle via Purina, both of which are int’l megacorps preying on stolen life, land, & water.

I drink coffee grown in Colombia, stolen lands populated by exploited Peoples who’ve been under the thumb of US-backed narco-politicians for decades.

The water for the coffee came from the Rio Grande & the San Juan. Rivers that have been in a mega drought for more than half my life. 

I drank that coffee from a mug made of clay I harvested from the lands my people killed for so that I could exist. 

I ate yogurt made by “I don’t know who” extracted from cows whose ancestors were imported to these stolen lands by colonists.

Cows which now are the leading cause of species extinction and endangerment here in the so-called southwest.

Cows which defined a Cowboys and Indians era of settler-nostalgia.

Dairy cows live a quarter of their lifespan from being constantly pregnant and milking.

This cow was most likely milked by an exploited migrant worker who came to US likely out of desperation brought on by the violence the US regularly enacts on those settler nations south of our settler nation in order to concentrate the wealth of this continent within our militarized nation’s borders. 

It’s not even 7 a.m. and I am connected / displaced / scattered to Peoples and lands across the continent and the world. I’m not yet fully conscious and already my day is flooded with settler-colonial, militarized imperial, extractive capitalists realities.

I’ve been out of bed for less than an hour and already the violent reality my existence contributes to, and is held hostage by, has been spread across this continent, to the point that I only notice it academically, only in story form.

The visceral reality, like these lives, have been displaced, dispersed, ungrounded. 

I wonder if I’m still asleep living the nightmare that is the American dream.

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May we all wake up again and again and tomorrow and continue to build more relational, connective, and collaborative ways of living so that we may all be liberated from the cult of death, dominance, and profit

Not in an individualists escape into some transcendent personal purity but in communal integrated reckon/gnition of our messy interdependence through time across lands.

May we build worlds of reckoning and reconnecting like our lives depend on it