FULL SPEECH SCRIPT:

Comunidades, communities of human animals listening in right now: I invite you to vision with me. Our thoughts, words, and actions, right now, are seeds for the future world in which we want to live. This moment in time offers us an opportunity for regeneration and renewal. Out of centuries of pain and grief from those who were killed, silenced or assimilated by this United States nation-state, we are finding new models for movement. We are cultivating ways of living that work for all beings within our ecosystem. We have shown up on this planet, at this moment, for planetary liberation. This liberation is inevitable, it is emerging everywhere, and every being has an important role to play.

I speak to you today from Ohlone Land. I speak through the connection to my ancestor-guides. Many of my ancestors have been settlers on Turtle Island as 19th and 20th-century immigrants of Italian, Cajun, and Irish descent. Some of my ancestors were indigenous to the land of Condors; en Bolivia. It’s time for settlers to name ancestral and current white privilege and unpack the feelings that arise in affinity groups- or groups of people who share experience and/or racial identity with you. My mixed identity brings mixed emotions to me: I carry both settler guilt and shame, as well as indigenous anger. ALL emotions are teachers when we acknowledge them through words, release them in ritual and transform them through action.

What emotions would you like to transform? What emotions would you like others to transform? Guilt becomes reparations. Shame becomes acceptance. Anger becomes asking for what you need. These are some of the ways I practice transformational justice in my colonizer-colonized inheritance. While our identities can be complex, this country was set up through one cultural lens. We are tasked with dismantling Eurocentric institutions and systems, educations and economies and rebuilding them with Black Leadership and guidance from the Tribes whose worldviews are indigenous to the lands we now occupy.

I am grateful to be alive right now. I am grateful to witness practices of consensus-driven decision-making, plant medicine workshops, models for community care instead of incarceration. I am here for new visions of a new country that works for all beings. A new flag. A new allegiance to local ecosystems, a priority placed on the well-being of all children and the basic right to have a home. We are pushing past a landlord-renter class division. Rent is theft. As we pay off a space to live we will be establishing partial-ownership there. All beings deserve a place to live: the plants and more-than-humyn animal species too. We are re-organizing our priorities and it is beautiful.  

I want to introduce you two incredible teachers.

Olivia Chumacero shares her indigenous philosophy and way of life called Everything is Medicine. Today I am applying Olivia’s teachings to our current moment: How we relate to this crisis is medicine. Long-term hopelessness and daily fear tax our nervous systems, making it hard to create the alternatives we desire. Sadness and anger are potent teachers and function best when they light action to transform the emotion and prevent despair from living too long in our bodies. Hopelessness weaks our immunity. What evidence of planetary liberation gives you hope right now?

Queen Hollins is a Black and Queer Leader passing on Black Indigenous Medicine that heals trauma through ritual, ceremony and intuitive knowing. She is the founder of the Earthlodge for Spiritual Transformation. Queen shares what her Grandmother passed on to her: that you can go into the Earth to heal. That being surrounded with Earth-like, soil!- literally getting into a hole you’ve dug in the ground, or a home made of Earth, brings healing. The Earth absorbs pain and relieves past and future generations of trauma. Find a community name and release pain with. Call in this community if you have yet to locate them. Go into the Earth and emerge healed.

Today I honor the power in the path that’s been laid out by the Great leaders of Liberation: The Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Water Protectors from the No Dakota Access Pipeline Movement (who won!) and today’s Movement for Black Lives. Their visions are unfurling broadly and I hear language they have inspired now spoken daily through mainstream Nd social media, that even a few years ago relegated to the fringe! We are guided.

What or who has been guiding you? What lessons have you been learning? I want to take a moment to honor your path of learning and unlearning. I pause to honor your cycles of k knowing and not-knowing, of action and rest.

What do you know, right now, about your unique contribution to planetary liberation? Visualize yourself in community, bringing your unique knowledge or skill set to the table of collective abundance.

I sense the Earth and Ancestors underneath our feet ready for our call. Connect to that support. Ask for that support. The knowledge in the Earth is the knowledge that sets us free.

Whose tribal land are you on? We are unsettling the names of places. What plants are native to where you live that provide food, medicine, and shelter to humyns and so many other species? Try learning about one new plant that’s indigenous to where you live. Consider planting a native plant that could thrive in your unique yard or neighborhood median. We are regenerating ecosystems.

What water can you redirect from plumbing into the Earth? How can you learn the flow of water in your habitat? Redirect rain into rain barrels or rain gardens. We are restoring aquifers.

What abundant weeds are growing around you, sharing free medicine for your body-mind-spirit? Seek to know these names and plants. Learn how to safely harvest and use them first. We are re-orienting in place.

Waaaay back in our blood memory, as Olivia Chumacero calls our DNA, we ALL knew how to live fully integrated in our local ecosystem. I witness the multitudes returning to growing and cooking food that heals. Dig a hole for your compost and cover it with dry leaves and soil!

What plants did your ancestors tend to for food and medicine? What is one new food you would like to cultivate, even if it’s an herb in a pot? What is one new recipe you’d like to learn?

I see a critical mass of people seeking to reacquaint themselves with their own ancestral Earth ceremonies. We are re-indigenizing.

I see us settlers listening where before we felt entitled to colonize with our beliefs. I see us settlers transferring land and paying reparations. We are redistributing wealth.

I see elders and healers deciding, now, to teach on a wide scale the knowledge they’ve been cultivating over their lifetime. We are connecting to our teachers.

How can you show love to your village today? Who are you checking in on? How can you ask for what you need? How can you share what you have in abundance? We are living in community. 

Form your affinity groups based on your unique experience in the world. Men-identifying folks, form your healing circles. Women-identifying humyns, gather your sisters. All bring reverence to non-binary humyn beings who carry necessary and potent medicine for this moment. White accomplices share material in your anti-racist cohorts. Mixed-race folks, unpack your complexities with each other. I see movements of Black, Indigenous, and Brown communities asking for what they need, calling out harm, and asking for restoration, unapologetically.

Extend these teachings to others. Acknowledge and release your pain or shame into the Earth. Find your teachers. Offer to them.

Ours is a destiny of planetary liberation.

We are learning how to thrive together. We are learning to be gentle on ourselves in our process. 

We are unsettling, we are re-indigenizing, society is re-balancing. Wherever you find yourself on this path, I send you strength and the will to take the best next steps for the highest and deepest good of all concerned, now. Our ancestors chose us for this transformation.

Thank you, Earth warriors, thank you, paradigm-shifters, thank you, people for planetary liberation, thank you Black and Indigenous collectives of leadership. This process is unfolding and unstoppable. Thank you for tuning in with me.