a collective blog by indigenous women photographers
"They, like their dad, won’t experience the world as I did physically with my brown skin, but my son is my son and they are my grandchildren. I am their brown mom and kôhkom and my love for them is beyond this realm, connecting them to their relatives in the process."
"He cried out for his mama. I can’t get this out of my head."
"Truth is there’s nothing normal about this so it’s okay to feel unsettled, to feel not like yourself."
"I wonder how she will remember this time – what she will take away from it. Will she remember how scared I was, or would she remember how, for the first time in years, I could spend hours upon hours with her and not have to work?"
"Vulnerability is allowing yourself to be unapologetically Black, unapologetically Indigenous. To operate in multiple planes of thought. To use slang and Ebonics in one sentence, and to speak eloquently in the next. It is accepting your paradox and embracing it with your whole self. To allow your boundaries to be the only lines that define you, to be multi-dimensional in your healing."
"Simultaneously, like in a dream, I hear both laughter and crying, coming from different parts of the big, curved room. No, it is not a dream. Today, we are laying a community member to rest."
"We know that survival and grief are never finished. We know that a mother’s scream is a battle cry. We know that it is our responsibility to stand up."
"We are continually made out to be an inconvenient truth for sharing our thoughts or our feelings during difficult political times."
In my mind’s eye, I see a reality in which exists an explicitly Black, Indigenous and Person Of Colour (BIPOC) owned club where everyone is truly welcome and able to explore their sexuality via accessing and providing sex work in the ways that feel safest and most uplifting to their spirits.
This is probably why I am all for selfies – I think we have spent enough time being told to bow our heads, to be silent, to not take up space. Love songs are written about how women don’t know they’re beautiful, as if realizing our beauty is the single greatest flaw we could have. As if we are only beautiful if affirmation comes from someone else. Fuck dat.
tea&bannock 