Many of my reflections here are/will be about the earthly, the erotic, and the divine. Spirituality, queerness, and indigineity are a lot of what I feel/think through.
What do “queer”, “indigenous”, and “spirituality” mean anyways? What types of relationships to the earth, waters, airs, sun, moon, spirit world, and one another might they refer to? Of course, each person & community can self-determine what these mean to them.
Nonetheless, these names for different ways of relating to one another are ontologies (ways of being) that many of our indigenous ancestors and an-sisters just embodied, just were, and perhaps didn’t need to name and define as we do now in english.
“Queer” “indigenous” “spiritual” relations were often named to pathologize, regulate, control them in order to justify colonial domination. Naming allowed for isolating, decontextualizing and condemning. Naming & stigmatizing these relationships enabled colonial narratives of savagery and saving that could justify stealing, extracting&exploiting lands. Insofar as indigineity, sexuality, and spirituality are intimately linked to the land, these relations were targeted for control
Some of the following relevant truths & questions come up for me consistently in relation to my queerness, spirituality, and connection to land.
spirituality
In indigenous traditions of spirituality around the world, including the Philippine* indigenous spiritualities with which I am most familiar, spirituality is centrally rooted in the land and creation stories.
*Philippines being a nationalist construction that through violence and resistance has tried to enforce both successfully and uncucessfully an umbrella state-hood between more than 1701 islands with 170+ languages
Some truths of my land connection and creation stories :
(1) I was born on unceded lands of Turtle Island as non-indigenous person with ancestry in so-called Philippines. The more i reflect on my relationship to these two lands, the more i come to relate to Turtle Island as an aunt who was forced to take me in under conditions of violence & force & enslavement, and yet still has loved and given so much life to me, and the Philippines as the mother whose many children have left her because colonial pillage has fragmented, objectified, and violated her in ways that make it hard for her take care of many of us.
(2) I am in the process of returning conmittedly to my ancestral lands (i’m starting by planning to live in the philippines for around half the year every year). Yet I am dis-connected from my philippine indigenous ancestries and and the intimate relationship to the land they would connect me to
If spirituality is indeed about land, how can I reconcile with spirituality in a way that honours the very real way i am both connected and disconnected from – but in a process of reconnecting with – a committed, culturally-specific relationship to the lands that have given me life?
I realize when I ask myself these questions that i often talk about land like it’s not ALWAYS THERE. Even in the most crude and cosmopolitan of urban spaces, the land is there, holding us, enabling us, regenerating us. I can still offer prayers to her there, and that is part of my (re)creation story. So how do I honour this messy, mostly urban, dis(connected), but always emerging creation story?
Through & with the only place I can truly say I’m indigenous to, my body.
indigeneity & the body
I take seriously an understanding of indigeniety as a committed, ceremony and ritual based relationship to a particular set of lands, cultures, cosmologies, and communities that is regenerative, reciprocal, loving, and long-term. I have not related to any sets of lands sufficiently in this way to feel “indigenous” to them. Given who I am, I feel I can only be indigenous to my own body.
Those of us who have (been) dis-located and re-located from our ancestral lands always carry the lands and their stories through out bodies. We can share the stories of our lands through out bodies even if we’ve been disconnected from the possibility of a committed relationship to them. In this spirit, i reflect a bunch on how i can honour the lands that have and continue to give me life through my body, how to re-create regenerative creation stories with the land. How do i connect to and inhabit my body in a way that regenerates and return to my cultures, my an-sisters and the lands & waters – my creatresses?
through / with my queerness?
queerness
i am so fucking queer ! i don’t know how else to say it.
my relationship to being queer is deep, deeper than Gender and Sexuality, even though G and S are certainly part of my queerness. my queerness is rooted in a relationship with the earth & spirit which embraces fluidity, diversity, connectedness, interdependence, and reciprocity not just in relation to humans of diverse genders and sexualities, but in my relations to all beings.
for me, being queer is about a deep and fluid relationality and connectedness that is seeded by and rooted in a very whole love, and it is this love that enables me to feel regenerated and that inspires me to regenerate.
colonially inherited and adopted projections of queerness have pathologized, invisibilized, objectified, categorized, marginalized, subjugated, and controlled “queer” peoples in many over-exploited black and brown lands.
this is partly because queer peoples in many different indigenous traditions including ones within Turtle Island and the Philippines have held unique roles in their communities that may have threatened colonial power.
a question that I often ask myself reflecting on all this is:
how can I remember my queerness as a spiritual process of committing to an earth-regenerating re-creation story?
deep shit!
i am trained as a colon hydrotherapist tho, so i at least paid a white lady to teach and certify me how to into delve into deep shit even tho i kind of already knew how to
we’ll see how this goes!!
blessingss
xoco
queer earth 