Rethinking Who We Are Through A Decolonizing Lense
[Music]
i i’m so grateful to be here with you
tonight
i cannot start this talk by first
acknowledging that we are in
unsurrendered occupied territory of my
cousins the lenape hawking people
you might be wondering who are the
quechua who are the aymara who am i
you see me right here
were in my polyera with so much pride
and speaking my indigenous language
quechua
but it hasn’t always been like that
growing up in peru
i was told
that i was mestiza
i didn’t see myself as indigenous
for people who are not familiar with
this term mestiza means to be of mixed
heritage
specifically between spaniard colonizers
and indigenous people
and it is a term that comes all the way
from the caste system
imposed during colonization as a way to
uphold white supremacy
meaning it was seen as better than being
indigenous but not as good as being a
spaniard or european
it has been hundreds of years and
somehow this term is still being used
in society as a way to identify
ourselves
all i knew about my ancestry was that my
family like many others took great pride
in our great great grandfather who was a
spaniard
i also knew i had a great grandmother
who was black
we didn’t talk about that and of course
i had some inca ancestors but they’re
extinct so
i was just mestiza
the experiences i had what i heard
what i saw everything pointed out that i
was mestiza and i believed it
until i came to new york
the most diverse city in the world where
people didn’t see a mestiza in fact
i would often get confused as mexican
ecuadorian amazonian
native american
that rang on me
i started questioning who i was
and
i have this identity crisis
i think many of us have been there
and i needed to know who i really was
for myself
educating myself about mestizahe led me
to learn about blood quantum which is a
way to measure how indian you are
and was created as a mechanism for
cultural genocide
and the more i learned the more i
realized
that i was in fact a detribalized
indigenous women
colonialism took away our lands
our religion
our customs
there is a reason i didn’t know i was
indigenous there is a reason i didn’t
know my native language there is a
reason i didn’t know i was quechua and i
mara
my grandparents spoke our native
languages
later in life they had to learn spanish
but because of systematic racism and
discrimination they didn’t pass it on
only 200 years ago indigenous languages
were spoken in its majority in countries
like mexico
by now
indigenous languages are in danger all
around the globe
so i decided to learn my indigenous
language
i started to take in classes immerse
myself in my culture
travel to the andes
and started learning my history told by
my people
from this beautiful journey of discovery
i have learned that you can’t love
what you don’t know
i remember thinking at some point in my
life in changing my indigenous last name
kispe
because i was thought
that it was too indigenous
and people would look down on me
it wasn’t until a year ago that i found
out
that kispe is quechua and it means the
crystalline and brilliant waters from
our apples
or glaciers
i fell in love
the moment i started this journey of
learning my history
and listening to my heart
was the moment i started to love myself
i felt confident in my skin
i started appreciating my features
but most importantly
i knew who i was
i adopted the name quechua sisa
as a way to reclaim my identity
i also started sharing my journey on
social media and surprisingly people
felt connected with it
i came to realize
that we all have been listening to
a narrative about indigenous people told
by one side of history which inspired me
to create an instagram
series called native voices
where i started to having live
conversations with indigenous people
from different nations like mapuches
from the south
ketra from the andes
dine navajo from the north
in order to learn more about
us
what a better way to learn about
indigenous people than by us teaching
them
as an artist
and as a storyteller
reconnecting to my indigenous heritage
gave me a greater mission
i recognize that a reason i didn’t see
myself as indigenous for most of my life
was because i believed in the
stereotypes i saw on tv
in film in the media
having no image has a detrimental impact
having a negative image has a
detrimental impact and even having a
false positive images
then people have superiority complexes
film is such a powerful medium
representation is important
it is a way to teach and to educate
so i have made it a point in my art to
tell stories
that break stereotypes
stories that not only serve an honor
reality but also inspire us to do better
as such i’m currently producing the
second season of vive quechua a youtube
channel by quechua that teaches our
culture through our language
so every people has their own unique
story
it is important to understand that we
all have been affected by colonialism
no matter where you’re from
there is a history of colonization
and it carries lots of trauma
no matter
if you were colonized
or settler
our society is still in the process of
ridding itself of white supremacy and
patriarchy let’s remember in the u.s
segregation was legal until 1950s
women gained the right to vote
only 70 years ago and native americans
were in the right to vote in every state
until 1962.
the last residential indian school
didn’t close until 1997.
these are realities that our
grandparents
parents
and even we have lived through
and we are still living through the
consequences
of
colonialism that mindset has been
normalized
it has not only affect how we perceive
ourselves
but also how we interact with each other
it affected me
growing up i believed
that i was less
because of
because i was taught
that my features
my skin color my last name my
indigeneity were not beautiful
this beauty standard
left no room to appreciate the beauty of
diversity
so as a teenager i consider
having a nose job
i avoided the sun
i tried to distance myself from my
indigeneity
and i thought
that no matter what i would do
i would never be enough
but
peeling away
the layers of my colony’s mind
i
came to
realize how valuable indigenous ways of
viewing the world are
for example in quechua language
there is only one pronoun for women and
men
bye
this tells us so much about the mindset
of gender roles
what does it mean to be a woman or a man
both have an important
role in our communities
women were also warriors and they would
also work in the field just like men
and pai
is not only the pronoun of people
but also other animals
we don’t have an exploded relationship
with animals or extracted relationship
with the earth
our diet is mostly vegetarian respecting
the cycles of life
indigenous people make up less than five
percent of the total human population
and support about 80 percent of the
global
biodiversity
when learning quechua i found out that
there is no word for nature
in fact we consider ourselves nature
and earth is our mother
pachamama
whom we treat with love and respect
another aspect that struck me the most
it’s that there is no word for friends
or friendship
in ketchup we call each other brother
and sister because we believe we are a
family
which gives us a sense of reciprocity
just
think
how much those mindsets
could change our life
there certainly changed mine
after learning this i remember seeing a
homeless person in the subway
and
just thinking
how did we fail
this person
as a society
for him to end up there
there is a history
there is a cause
there is a system behind that
just like mass incarceration mass
immigration
missing and murder indigenous women
addictions poverty hunger
club may change broken treaties
detention center
slave labor
and the list
continues
colonization carries trauma and affects
all of us
meaning there is no group of people in a
position to save others because we all
have been affected by it
it is important to look straight in the
eyes
of this painful
uncomfortable
but important history
we need to have the courage
to learn and be accountable
our global society has been influenced
by these colonized minds for centuries
knowing and accepting where and who you
are
can prepare us to move forward on a path
of collective healing the reality we
live in
is the result of how we perceive
ourselves
collectively and how we interact with
each other
so i’m here to remind you all
that our history
your story
didn’t begin with colonization
indigenous is a global term
and we all
have indigenous
roots to somewhere
i challenge you to rethink who you are
through a decolonizing lens
breaking the stereotypes that society
places upon who we are
are important in order to shape
our future and enrich our lives
i can assure you
that the greatest gift you can give to
yourself
is knowing where you come from
at the end we are all interconnected
we are brothers and sisters
one
with
thank you