We’ve Been Here

I’ve been known to eat popcorn with both hands. For some reason, I’ve developed this technique where I’ll grab a handful with my left hand and continue to eat with my right hand. Maybe it’s because, growing up, I developed a scarcity mentality with having to share popcorn between cousins, or maybe it’s because when I really love something, I really love something.

I’m doing the same thing today. I have pockets, hands and a mouth full of cherries. So juicy and generous. So sweet and so refreshing. I am here for this moment. I honestly can’t get enough. Abundance stacked on abundance.

Maybe it’s because the cherries are tossed in between so many other delicious snacks, made by beautiful hands, with beautiful hearts, and beautiful shared experiences. There is a little extra love sprinkled on our crag snack pile today.

As my chipmunk cheeks bulge with cherry abundance, I am suddenly feeling it all. I watch my friends crush, explore and share beta, laugh, play tunes, and in some small way, cultivate a safer space where our bodies can rest, rejuvenate, and heal on the Land. I knew that climbing could do this, but witnessing it, here today, with a mouth full of cherries, it hits me.

We’ve been here. Navigating spaces, structures, cultural norms that were made to erase and remove our bodies, cosmologies and place-based knowledge from social construct. We’ve been here, though.

I’ve heard before the saying, “We are here because our ancestors survived.” I also like to feel into the fact that we are here because our ancestors prayed, governed, resisted, laughed, cried, felt, visualized, imagined, connected, sacrificed, remembered, mourned, reimagined, ate handfuls of cherries, fell in love, experienced heartbreak, raged, healed, and everything in between.

Colonialism is predicated on structural and strategic systems of institutionalized oppression aimed at the genocide of Indigenous Nations (including Black and Brown communities in their indigeneity to their homelands and waters) and the removal of their bodies from kin-centric lines to the Land. We’ve been here.

For those of you who are only now doing the work to unpack internalized racism in your own hearts and families; there is room for you here.

This work belongs to all of us. We belong to this work. Take a big breath, there is room for you here.

Now take in another big breath, and slow down.

With the recent conscious uprising of bipoc experiences in relation to colonial state violence, many of our non-bipoc counterparts are eager to jump aboard and support the visions, world-views and voices of our communities. Voices that have been largely ignored and or footnoted until quite recently. We’ve been here.

And yet, only now are we receiving outreach from nonbipoc industry, reps, photographers etc. in the name of “diversity and inclusion.”

We’ve been here.

Diversity and inclusion are not terms that come from our communities. Instead we ask, “Diversity of what? Inclusion to where? Equity? Why?” Diversity and inclusion do not require structural change, relational transformation and centred bipoc leadership. Diversity and inclusion are dangerous roads that can enable ongoing extraction of bipoc embodiments, knowledge, wisdom and experience, if not safe-guarded in conscious and ongoing consent-based accountability, antiracist methods and ongoing critical self-location/reflection.

In the wake of so many folks waking up to racialized issues in our society, we see that non-bipoc people are eager to jump on board, however we witness relationships which reproduce extractive tendencies under the trickster guise of “diversity and inclusion.” When we say extractive, we mean to say, photos or images of our communities taken without a meaningful relationship, trust, consent and ongoing care and commitment to the shared work we do to anti-racist efforts in our families, in our communities and at the crag.

For those of us who have been doing the work for years in the areas of bipoc representation, leadership and storytelling, many of us continue to be erased from our work due to unchecked privilege white photographers “taking” images of our bodies clearly for the “colourization” of their personal Instagram, industry or portfolio.

As we sit back and watch, we can literally correlate social media posts featured across different industry and photographer pages with recent bipoc-led responses to state violence. This type of situation is not isolated; it comes from intergenerational relationships between non-bipoc and bipoc

communities. Relationships defined by broken treaties, taking, stealing, removing, broken trust, appropriation and erasure. This happens over and over again, museums (stolen ancestral artifacts), universities (extraction of our knowledge), cultural appropriation, etc.

As photographers, filmmakers and storytellers, we know the power of imagery and believe in the practice of self-determination through storytelling. It is important for our communities to self-represent and to share who we are from the inside-out; not the outside in. To share who we are in relation to Land and to one another, in our own languages, words and imagery. Visual storytelling is self-determination, is knowledge mobilization, is ref lective of community-led engagement and relational transformation.

bipoc people process and heal from colonial violence in different ways. And many of us welcome in non-bipoc peoples to learn and unpack the complexities we deal with every single day. At the grocery store, on the trail, our walk to the mailbox, how we birth our babies, grow our food, tattoo our bodies, participate in ceremony, access education and health care, and yup, even in how we climb.

This influences how, where, when and if we climb.

Folks are ready to reconsider how we engage with recreation in the outdoors. Perhaps we also need to “recreate recreation.” Beyond diversity, beyond inclusion, beyond the hashtag and toward real transformation grounded in revitalized belonging to the Land and Waters and meaningful leadership embedded in our community wisdom. Climbing is a piece of our family identity. It is who we are, and where we can make sense of the world around us. It is a channel to re-enact meaningful kinship to place. Place, as a continuation of ourselves in relation to Land. Land as relative, Land as umbilical chord to our highest selves and origin stories. Origin stories as constellations in the sky, sketched in our dna and guiding our way forward into the next seven generations.

When we climb, we return to the Land. When we return to the Land, we return to ourselves. When we return to ourselves, we remember how to return to one another.

There is no hashtag for this.

I’ve moved on from the cherries and am digging the fresh salsa that Bilal brought.

Maybe I am taking handfuls of these snacks because I am overflowing. I feel the generosity and abundance of our community in this space. In this moment, and I want to remember it forever.

I almost feel moved to tears, because I know that this food is made with love for our peoples. I know that this food is meant to nourish our bodies so that we can continue to carry forward the work of our ancestors in a good way. This work that belong to us and that we belong to.

We’ve been here.

We are here.

Reimagining our kinship to Land so that we can reimagine our way forward, out and beyond the stories imposed by colonial violence. So that we can rise up in reclaimed and renewed kinship to one another and the Land.

This isn’t diversity and inclusion.

This is radical love. Transformative relations and reimagined possibilities of ancestral futurity.

We’ve been here.