“between a rock and a home place”

After witnessing the environmental damages that fracking had caused in Diné’tah around Counselor, NM.

After hearing about the fracking pad that exploded a few hundred feet from a home.

After listening to Diné men Sam Sage and Daniel Tso talk about the generational responsibility they had to this land, to their grandparents, parents, kids, and grandkids.

After hearing about how the capitalist-colonial obstacles set in Sam and Daniel’s way to prove that their People are being poisoned.

After learning of the ancestral healing held for Diné among the rocks and cliffs of the Bears Ears lands.

After beginning to understand how their generational responsibilities to their lands are directly impeded by my People as we created a life for ourselves in someone else’s home/land.

After realizing how much of my history I had no knowledge of, and how much of my own generational responsibilities were ignored, never passed down, and contributed to my People’s generational traumas.

After all this I found myself at so-called Muley Point overlooking the goosenecks carved out by the San Juan river and I found myself feeling this heaviness and feeling between a rock and a home place.

I believe that one of the essential ingredients in settlers’ unsettling is learning to be with the identity-shattering discomfort, overwhelm, grief, sorrow, and betrayal that comes with learning why we are here in this land and how we got here -- how our sense of self and home were created at the expense of Indigenous People’s’ lives and lifeways. and then all of it ignored, erased, or justified.

We must embody the weight of this grief, we’ve ignored so much for so long, we must learn to practice “staying with the trouble.”

One of the ways I do this is by practicing being a rock. I put my body in uncomfortable places among the rocks I know as home and stay,
and stay,
and stay,
and stay.

The grief and unsettling realities don’t go away but are digested, becoming a part of me. but this digesting destroys all that I once was.

We must be destroyed to be whole, just, responsible, and to be good relatives
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May our collective chrysalis destroy who we once were.​