#IndigenousPeoplesDay

Today, in recognition of Indigenous People’s Day, I honor the Tongva/Gabrielino ancestors and caretakers of this unceded land in Southern California I currently call home.

And I recognize my unrecognized familial roots. My family is from New Mexico. We have been there, in the region of the Pueblo, Apache and Navajo since before the time of my Great Great Grandparents.

Because of white supremacy and the need to survive, all ties to Native roots and even Mexican-ness have been erased, replaced instead with a Spanish identity. It’s not unique to my family. It is the special sauce of denial for survival that is endemic to the southwest.

3 years ago, today, we were at Mesa Verde in Colorado, cliff dwelling home of the Ancestral Puebloans.

This statue was outside and I stopped to admire her. My daughter said I looked like her.

I’ve never received a compliment that landed in my bones so deeply, the way walking on my Native New Mexican soil does.

So today, I honor and I wonder. I won’t venture to claim anything, knowing nothing other than my people have been on that land, born from that land, from the dirt of the desert for many, many generations. I don’t know what they called themselves before they called themselves Spanish...

What I will claim is the selective survival amnesia that comes from being a colonized people, who end up being unsure, insecure of how and what to claim.