Throwing Shade to the West – La enseñanza en Aztlán1 Cherríe Moraga UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA If anything is most vital, essential, and absolutely important in Native cultural philosophy, it is this concept of interdependence: the fact that without land there is no life, and with a responsible social and cultural outlook by humans, no life-sustaining land is possible —Simón Ortiz2
So, this is where we begin. On the edge of a kind of extinction. The knife edge, el filero, in itztli. We begin with what has been broken in the first place. We begin with five and a quarter centuries of genocide, ethnocide, de-Indianization, the theft of Native lands, the reservation system, Indian boarding schools and too many trails of tears to map; the separation of familias, the rape of Native women on and off the reservation; an endless litany of poverty and its death call of diabetes, heart-disease, and suicide. The rupture continues south with the forced migration of pueblos originarios – ICE raids, detention camps, NAFTA and its femicidal rampage along la frontera, thousands of native mexicanos, hondureños y guatemaltecos fleeing forced prostitution, drug cartels, and empty bellies, only to arrive at the U.S. border scratching entry at an impenetrable wall of bifurcated state—sanctioned ignorance. Let us begin with the truth that through-out the globe, Indigenous values, world views, and ways of life are being systematically eroded and disappeared through the single objective of profit at all human costs and at nature’s expense. Let us acknowledge that this also means us who are at loss. As a Xicana and a writer and a teacher now old enough to be ‘elder’ if not wise enough to be ‘an elder,’ I have a stake in believing that our indigenous identities (some we can name and some we cannot) might serve to draw us a roadmap home to a decolonized education and livable future. This is truly what El Plan de Santa Bárbara may have asked of us fifty years ago. As such, these are notes to a larger reflection, in conversation with others, on the revolutionary promise found in such ‘return,’ not as some easy nostalgia, but as evolving social and political engagement with value systems in accord with nature. The right to live in a world of reciprocal relations to one another and our planet has been systemically denied us through a world his-tory of land grabs— small and large, as large as the globe itself. As Simon Ortiz explains it, “The greatest and most horrible trauma Indigenous peoples of the Americas have experienced and endured… has been the loss of place… due to loss of land.”
1
This developing essay grew out of the Verbal Kaleidoscope — First Writers and Scholars in Indigenous Languages and Literatures Conference, sponsored by the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of California, Santa Barbara. April 4, 2018. 2 “Introduction” in Speaking for the Generations – Native Writers on Writing. Sun Tracks Books, 1997, p. xii. 177
