@akira_lightthatheals | Water Has No Enemy, photograph, 13×19 |
Akira is an Undocumented farmer and artist to Turtle Island. Using photography to write stories about futures for the purpose of creating new myths and changing the way we relate to land.
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5 Questions:
1. In 1994 the trade agreements between Mexico and the U.S forced Mexico’s economy to be exploited into the global free market that destroyed a lot of local economies in Mexico. Like in my village. Farm families, unable to compete with American cheap corn that was subsidize by the American government, forced a lot of young people like my mother to leave her rural village to make income through exploitative labor in the U.S. It wasn’t migration but forced displacement of a generation of youth. My mother, a single mother at 22 crossed the desert through Tijuana with 3 years old me. And like that I was separated from the land of my grandmothers. An absence I continue to feel in my life. It was that absence that later made me seek that love through my relationships to other lands.
My family’s journey is a continuation of one started by our ancestors long ago. Except that it was migration for the purpose of having relationships to other lands and people. To continue a practice that tends to the way we relate to land and each other as people. Not to sell our bodies and be separated from the power of land. There’s a difference between migration and forced displacement.
My mother did give me a better life but not because I’m able to choose the American dream, but because I am able to continue to practice and have the relationships my ancestors were able to have before borders and people calling themselves Americans.
2. While a lot of harm has been felt by the youth of my family by being separated from land and our elders, I understand now that my ancestors who resisted white supremacy have send us here to continue the responsibility of protecting Turtle Island and liberate it from the power of coloniality.
3. While the reason was forced displacement, I continue to repair my relationship to land and realize that I am continuing the legacy of my ancestors. I believe my ancestors want me to continue to having relationship to different lands and the people who belong to it to continue this responsibility of maintaining the kinship of land and each other. I continue to learn what love is through the land.
4. I feel the pull between my present life and my roots when I continue to see the violence done to people like me for being Indigenous. How I continue to see Custom Border Patrol agents kill people without accountability. When the hurt becomes deep and embedded in my psyche, I ask myself, Why do I continue to be in a country who’s policies are to enslave me for my labor and keep me out from having any self determination to live the way my ancestors would have wanted me? I want to continue to migrate without the fear of white supremacy. Where am I really safe if the land itself is oppressed? It would truly be easier to go back to Mexico, a country that would accept me instead of hunting me down to make profits from my enslavement and suffering. Nothing will ever be the same. No answer will ever be enough to justified what I saw this country allowed while it burned oil only to destroy land. Only to destroy farmland to house workers of this evil country.
5. My hope is centered around creating a school of land for kids, to teach Indigenous philosophies and the application of it through farming and living in community. I want to create environments where kids can continue to have a relationship with land and community. I want to show them how to build fires, plant Lemonbalm and corn. I want to create stories for kids about our future with land without white supremacy. I want to create new myths for them. The new myth that we came to United states through our ancestors to protect the land we now live on and liberate it from the idea of domination (ownership), we didn’t come here to become like the settler colonizer who cannot give themselves to land unless they own it. We didn’t come here to be “successful” like settlers who say they are not their ancestors when clearly they are. We came here to continue to legacy of our ancestors