ALEXIS MOH

ABOVE IS A VIDEO ADDRESS. PRESS PLAY IN CENTER OF AUDIENCE

Speech Collaboration with Jim Wurst

SCRIPT:

My fellow human animals of occupied Turtle Island

In these fearful and uncertain times within the settler borders of the so-called United States

I address you from unceded Lenni-Lenape Territory

While I don't believe in holding any position of power over anyone, I have been given this platform, so here's what I'll say: this land must be returned to its rightful guardians, as the obvious first step into dismantling the ways of life that are fueling a toxic feedback loop towards destruction of all.

I recognize that I myself am a settler here. I have no right to make any declaration on how giving this land back should look. The "Land Back" movement, acknowledges that even this paradigm of ownership comes from a colonialist mindset. However, given the reality of ongoing genocide, resource sieges, broken treaties, and countless scenarios that could only be described as forceful displacement and stealing, there's no way to break out of this paradigm without addressing the due reparations.

The existing method and context for "giving the land back," I learned from Corinne Rice and Andrew Perera, both educators of Lakota and Mohawk ancestry. This method takes the form of a landowner presenting their property to the appropriate Tribal Council, and signing over their land deed to the tribe. This person would still have private access and control of their land, but instead of state tax, they would pay Tribal taxes, and the land would be under tribal jurisdiction instead of the state. While this is seen as a radical individual action, it is also very much one confined by the power structure currently in place.

Now, when we speak of broken treaties, this refers to what is supposed to have always been under Tribal jurisdiction. Unbroken, treaty land should account for 80% of the United States.

When the Supreme Court handed down its decision that acknowledged Muscogee Nation sovereignty over half the state of Oklahoma, Joy Harjo, the US poet laureate and a member of the Muscogee Nation, wrote in the NY Times, “The elders, the Old Ones, always believed that in the end, there would be justice for those who cared for and who had not forgotten the original teachings, rooted in a relationship with the land.”

Since then, the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County bought back 1,199 acres along Little Sur River. And thanks to the precedent of the Oklahoma ruling, the Oneida Nation won back the rights entitled to them by the 1838 Treaty between the Oneida and the United States.

"Land Back" is an Indigenous youth led movement. What started as a hashtag now denotes the official and legal recognition of these sovereign Indigenous homelands, returning these territories to their rightful stewardship.

In the history of a continent built on the most insidious theft of people, resources, culture, labor, and life, our current lives as "Americans" still directly operates on the ongoing genocide of Black and Native lives.

I don't know if true justice can ever be served. However, the existential crisis that is climate chaos, this pandemic, this white supremacist capitalist system that strangles us all--means we are losing time to come to these realizations before the desperate circumstances create a new level of desperate violence that leave most of us with the same no-choice choice that has been more normalized as a US export than our daily reality: fight or flight.

The legacy of slavery and stolen land continues so saliently and is so omnipresent (and at this point, international) that to even admit there is any of that blood on your hands feels impossible for many, when really that's just the starting point. Real change must come from a place of truly understanding that allowing yourself the narrative that your privileges somehow are unconnected to these ongoing genocides and ecocides, only delays the inevitable--at this point in our species, there is no escape from facing the music.

I understand some may be afraid that revenge and retribution is what would follow, but given the necessity of fixing this fundamental, underlying wrong, isn't the better question to ask, how do we make this transition as gentle as possible? How do we support in passing off such a damaged situation? Can we apologize? How do we change the spirit of this relationship, so we can all face together the forces of nature at hand?

Whatever we do going forward, I defer to the first peoples of the regions we occupy. They never wanted these pipelines, these borders, these policing structures, these ecological and hierarchical abuses...
I too am a settler here, who has gained benefits from "the land of opportunity," who sees the terrible power of this country and humbly ask for the grace and guidance of the original stewards of Turtle Island, so that we can support the work of nursing this land and its people towards a path of recovery. Thank you to those who have given your lives to clearing this path. Everyone else, hi. Welcome.