youth autonomous organizing

I am also a farmer, mother, and auntie. I take care of animal relatives like sheep, horses, pigs, and chickens, as well as plant relatives and the soil which provides the nutrients for the plants and our bodies and the land again in constant cycles of reciprocity. These are processes of kinship that have been passed down for millennia, in Diné we call this K’é. K’é is the overarching philosophy of the Diné; it is the complex system of interconnectedness between humans and the universe. Dine philosophies and their complexities cannot be described in its entirety using colonial language, but because we are living under a colonial occupation it is necessary to avoid gatekeeping information if we want to still have our kinship systems in place during an imminent crisis. Over the past few years I have learned that there is opportunity in crisis and we can heal ourselves to show up better in the community. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic myself and my comrades at the K’é infoshop and community volunteers worked to provide food boxes for families affected by the COVID crisis. The K’é infoshop had built up a food bank over the year and had been doing mutual aid even before the pandemic started and so we were set to begin pandemic relief efforts and immediately distributed all our supplies in two weeks. After gaining more donations and a regular food drop off we were able to provide enough food for families for two weeks and we did this entirely voluntarily risking our lives collectively to ensure that our people's material needs were met. Whether people needed water, food, medicine, cleaning supplies, and other necessities we made sure our community was taken care of. We did this without support from our own tribal government and on our own terms. This was a great feeling of autonomy and what we could get done if we came together collectively to practice kinship rooted in anticapitalism and anticolonialism. We prioritize elders, single parents, children, trans and queer relatives, and unsheltered kin because we know that they are the most marginalized, and disposed of under capitalism and settler colonialism. Mutual aid is important to our autonomy and so our community can thrive without dependence on the settler-colonial state. We cannot let mutual aid be a bandaid fix. We need to continue striving for sustainable community practices of skill-sharing and refuse the charity model and remember that we do this in solidarity not charity.

A lot of the work I do is involved in Land caretaking and being a good relative to the earth during a time of climate crisis. This summer in the southwest we continued to see a record drought, record high temperatures, and a less than adequate monsoon season. We had more water than the previous summer but it did not give us as much as we would need to reverse climate change. It is obvious that no settler colonial government can mitigate the climate crisis. The world's biggest so-called climate scientists can’t even name the real reasons why our climate is in crisis and we are being catapulted by the wealthy and ruling classes to all over catastrophe. We cannot let this news or reactionary politics lead us to despair. We need to turn to kinship and ignite the flame of revolution in all those around us.

I want to remind youth everywhere that now is the time to listen to those who have the knowledge necessary to liberate ourselves and our communities and develop and share skills to live autonomously. Be united in struggle always, make comrades across the world living in the struggle and this will make us unstoppable in the eyes of the oppressor. Lean on your ancestors courage and prayers and songs sung to ensure the livelihood of our generations and look to the future for this hopefulness and look to the past for that medicine to keep going. I look up to those fierce queer and femme revolutionaries who have paved the way for the resistance to keep growing. Now more than ever in these unprecedented times we have the chance to change our worlds.