Building bridges through stories
Activist, educator and oral historian guides people to create narratives, effect change
The girls who showed up for her small poetry class would range in age from 13 to 18; they ranged in writing ability from third-grade level, or lower, to phenomenal. Every time she arrived at the Santa Fe County Youth Development Program for the Voces de Libertad workshops, a yearlong project that ended in the spring, Mi’Jan Celie ThoBiaz would have a whole new group, posing new challenges. She never knew why the girls were there or where a girl was headed when she left — if she was going home or to another juvenile lockup.
Tho-Biaz didn’t press the girls to tell their personal stories, but she would prompt them: “If fear is a sound, what does it sound like?” she would ask. “If fear is a smell, what season is it placed in?”
She recalled one girl, about 15, who was a rare repeat customer. “She is expecting to get out, like everybody else is getting out, and that’s not happening,” said Tho-Biaz, 42. The teen’s morale was diminishing.
One day, the girl, casually flipping through her notebook, asked, “Would you mind if I shared this with you, Mi’Jan?”
Tho-Biaz was blown away: “She reads this poem that is fire.”
I remember/ my momma cried herself to/ sleep with bruises/ on her cheeks while I walked/ the streets.
She would not allow herself to cry in front of the girls as they shared stories and poems about the struggles they had faced, “but this is really stretching me,” Tho-Biaz said. “I’m crying on the inside.”
In a time when alternative facts increasingly commingle with realities and fake news makes genuine headlines — generating confusion and widening divisions — Tho-Biaz is teaching people to build bridges with stories.
Facts don’t resonate, said ThoBiaz, an activist, educator and oral historian who works with marginalized groups in the Santa Fe area — incarcerated youth, kids in locals schools, women of color, Pueblo people — teaching them transform their truth and trauma into powerful narratives.
Start reciting statistics, and people will tune out. “But if you give them a story that makes them laugh or cry, you’ve hooked them,” she said. “They care. They know why they should care.”
She’s guiding groups to use stories as an organizing tool, a way to bring about change. It’s a concept she calls healing justice.
Tho-Biaz, selected as one of The New Mexican’s 10 Who Made a Difference for 2017, has been active on many community boards and has been collaborating with an array of organizations, extending her reach and expanding her mission of planting seeds of selfempowerment. She sees a potential leader in everyone she works with, from a teen in a detention center to an indigenous grandmother who is passing cultural traditions to new generations.
“Mi’Jan is known for her ability to inspire youth, co-workers and friends,” said Demetria Martinez, a writer who started Voces de Libertad and was one of the people who nominated Tho-Biaz for the honor. “She makes ‘making a difference’ fun; for Mi’Jan, activism it is not merely a civic duty but a way we joyfully form bonds of community, empowering all to help Santa Fe live up to its fullest potential.”
With a background in social work, public health and reproductive justice, primarily as the manager of a women’s health clinic, the Chicago native has been working with the nonprofit Tewa Women United to design a Native doula training and certification program.
“In the spring, I’ll be doing story-gathering work with Tewa Women United,” she said.
And she is developing a leadership initiative with the Santa Fe Community Foundation for women of color who are involved in nonprofit work.
“We are a minority-majority state,” she said. “When I look at nonprofit leadership, and I do not see a gender-balanced, culturalbalanced leadership, I find that deeply challenging. Especially to organizations that are in service to people of color.”
A mother of two, Tho-Biaz moved to Santa Fe several years ago, as she was finishing her doctoral degree in multicultural education. She chose the city partly because it was “a sweet home environment” for her kids, a son who is now a student at The University of New Mexico and a daughter at Santa Fe High School.
Her first job in the area was at New Mexico Highlands University, teaching educators.
“I was getting an amazing taste for what was happening in public education in Northern New Mexico,” she said. The state had just started implementing its school grading system, and the anxiety among her students was palpable.
Through a program at the Academy for the Love of Learning, she then spent a year paired with a teacher in a middle school class at Monte del Sol Charter School, leading story projects in which the students got to know themselves and their classmates on a deeper level.
“Narrative work can build compassion,” she said.
The work culminated in an exhibit of self-portraits, poems and stories at a local gallery.
The poetry of the kids in the detention center program also was displayed in prominent places, such as El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe. Some of the poems were set to music for a Santa Fe Desert Chorale concert.
And the girl whose fiery words so moved Tho-Biaz were published in Pasatiempo. She had placed in a writing contest.
“I can’t tell you how over the moon she is,” Tho-Biaz recalled of the girl’s reaction when she learned that her poem had an audience.
“I don’t know where she is now,” she said of the teen, “but I know she isn’t back there.” And she’s certain the girl is still filling notebooks with poems.
Martinez said Tho-Biaz has had a profound effect on the teen girls in Voces de Libertad and participants of similar programs throughout the community.
“In honoring the creative potential of young people,” Martinez said, “often considered society’s ‘throwaways,’ she helps them see their lives differently; they realize they have special gifts they can use to one day serve society.”