A Continued Evolution Rather than a Fossilized Past: Decolonizing Storytelling

Colonization has not ended. We are not in a post-colonial age in a similar way that we are not in a post-racial age. Colonization has simply become normalized, perpetuated by dominant culture narratives, and accepted by the majority as part of life.

Being a bilingual, Colombia-born storyteller with Afro-Euro-Indigenous (colonizer and colonized) roots, colonialism has been bred into my bones. It has also grown weeds onto my tongue and has been forced upon me as an identity of my nativity, even though I can trace my lineage on this land back thousands of years, long before quixotic Europeans (some of whom were also my ancestors) set foot on these shores. I call myself Colombia-born instead of Colombian because Colombia was named after Christopher Columbus. (Even this attempt to center my full self is still limiting.) The territory now known as Colombia is the only country in the world named after probably the most infamous colonizer. Colombian means follower of Columbus, and I am not a supporter of Columbus. Period.

When Spanish American revolutionaries took up arms 200 years ago and fought a decade’s worth of war to liberate themselves from imperial Spain, and after they secured their independence from the grip of Spanish royals, the revolutionaries decided to call the hard-won territory Colombia after the colonizer. It was not that these victorious rebels were against colonialism, per se. No. Instead, these revolutionaries were against Spanish colonialism, Iberian colonialism. The elite Spanish Americans wanted to control the land, people, minds, future, flora, fauna, and biota on the hips of this newly conquered continent. They wanted to remain in power without having to bow down to, or give a little back to, the crown. No, it was not that they were intrinsically against colonialism.

Further, the fact that we still call ourselves Colombians two centuries later and that we have not—with any earnestness or eagerness—dissected such a situation is troublesome and exasperating. I would love to start a movement to rename ourselves to reclaim ourselves so we can then reinhabit ourselves in a way that is more aligned to the reality of who we are, collectively, in a more inclusive way, instead of consistently having to elevate the colonial part of our history as the most valuable identity worth centering, thereby dehumanizing the Brown and Black aspects of ourselves, as a result. Our current group name is the ultimate monument to settler colonialism—a narrative statue that needs to be toppled for us to truly advance in the journey of liberation.

That said, settler colonialism should be understood as a structure, not an event. Simply renaming ourselves will not liberate us. Wars of liberation from colonial powers, or “peaceful” transitions into autonomous states and away from colonial forces, should not be how we measure the existence of colonialism. When we decolonize, we decolonize the whole self, not just an aspect of our oppressed identities. As bell hooks advanced, decolonization is a centering process that takes us from slavery to freedom, from void to wholeness. It’s a process of transformation that intentionally shifts away from institutions, systems, policies, and cultures of domination. It is a critical process of self-examination and communal introspection. We have to be constantly creating new language, telling new stories, acting off different scripts, and building new systems to allow us to be who we really are and want to become. Current colonial and binary languages, the whitewashing of history, the gatekeepers of culture, and the designers of our policies keep us bound to settler colonialism as they continue to essentialize us into something that is either limiting, distorted, or false for the sake of the power and comfort of the status quo. Sometimes that status quo is hundreds of years old, regardless if it considers itself a present-day colony.

I come from the Audre Lorde school of resistance in that I am dedicating both my life and my creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices because, as Lorde wrote: “Your silence does not protect you.” Lorde emphasized that “the transformation of silence into language and action is a self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger.” People are afraid of others’ reactions for speaking, but mostly for demanding visibility, which is essential to live. Lorde added, “We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and ourselves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid. […] People are taught to respect their fear of speaking more than silence, but ultimately, the silence will choke us anyway, so we might as well speak the truth.”

Even when we are afraid, we can learn to speak. I am done allowing others to choke me. I am done choking myself. I am done biting my tongue for the comfort of others, which directly burdens me with the consequences of oppression—mine and yours. I want to become more than just a survivor. I want to overcome my own complicity in my and your suffering, and I want you to overcome yours, as well. I want to reinvent and create beyond what we have accepted as the best of all possible worlds. I will start with my voice, and yours. As Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis wrote, “The narratives you give power through silence become our future.” Let us be silent no more. ?

***

For this conversation, I want to set a foundation that builds upon my autobiography, a diaspora story of migration from South America to both Canada and the United States. I want to start by interpreting one of my poems, entitled “The Wind,” to enforce my tone. The poem is about decolonizing and indigenizing ourselves. The poem centers two characters: the wind and the fireflies.

• The wind represents an Indigenous child torn away from his parents and community via the residential and boarding school initiatives, whose primary objective was to “civilize” or assimilate Indigenous children and youth into Euro-Canadian and Euro-United Statesian cultures. In short, these so-called “schools” were designed to “kill the Indian and save the man.”
• The fireflies in the poem are the descendants of enslaved Africans throughout the Americas, whose ancestors were kidnapped, taken hostage by white human traffickers, packed into ships like sardines and taken across the Atlantic Ocean, and forced to work in death camps by torturers and murderers after these said enslavers had already nearly wiped out most of their previous forced labor: the Indigenous communities from which the wind is a descendant.

In the piece, both the wind and the fireflies journey to find their cultural, social, and historical roots under environments that have whitewashed their past, erased them from history, invalidated their experiences, gaslighted them, vilified them, and attempted (at times succeeded at) genocide against them.

The wind searches for its mother as a form of Rematriation, validation, and healing. In this process, the wind stumbles upon the fireflies, who are also on their own personal and communal journeys. Yet, as they come to realize, even those with lit paths can feel lost at times. Even those of us who can trace our lineages to a specific region of the world can still feel invisible, adrift, misplaced, and cast away—exploited, marginalized, undervalued, overlooked, silenced, and forgotten by intentionally designed systems of oppression and dominant cultures that continue to be part of our society’s legacy. The poem, “The Wind,” follows the survivors of settler colonialism as they search for remnants of their cultures, of their heritages, of their peoples, of their identities, of their homes on Turtle Island and Africa.

Some people go through their day-to-day lives as if some of us have not experienced dystopia. They read their dystopian novels as warnings of what can happen in the future if we continue on, or take, a certain path. But, for example, Indigenous folks worldwide continue to experience that dystopia since settler colonialism. Their fears are and have been a reality for many of us; they just happen to benefit from our dystopia.

Imagine experiencing genocide, theft of your ancestral lands, your sacred rituals made illegal, forced to assimilate and detach yourself from your culture and your people. Imagine having your language and traditions outlawed and made punishable. Imagine being suppressed and being treated like a beast of burden or second class (if treated like humans at all) for generations and generations and generations and generations. Then, you’re made out to be the terrorist of the story—deserving of the brutalization and dehumanization—through the enacted and enforced policies and the whitewashing of history and the whitewashing of all forms of art, culture, and storytelling. This is dystopia.

When a person, a book, a film, a society, a culture, etc., labels the survivors of settler-colonial oppression as savages, while simultaneously identifying the oppressors as civilized, this should be a blatant indication of the whitewashing of history and our collective stories.?

The criminalization and dehumanization of our existence, the whitewashing of history, and the erasure of a people and culture from it is a form of genocide.?

This is a problem that requires your attention and mine, as whether we like it or not, whether we are conscious of it or not, our actions, habits, dispositions, rituals, practices, and beliefs are more likely than not perpetuating such a legacy, making us complicit, regardless of our intent.

***

The eradication of culture and imagination is an essential part of settler colonialism. I agree with Laguna Pueblo feminist Paula Gunn Allen when she stated that “the wars of imperial conquest have [also] been fought within the minds, bodies, and hearts of the people of the earth for dominion over them.” She said that “we must remember our origins, our cultures, our histories, our mothers and grandmothers, for without that memory, which implies continuance rather than nostalgia, we are doomed to engulfment by a paradigm that is fundamentally inimical to the vitality, autonomy, and self-empowerment essential for satisfying, high-quality life.”

Colonial paradigms, time and again, continue to try to have us believe that Indigenous peoples were not civilized or cultured until we came across European whiteness and Euro-centric ways of life, thinking, and doing; that we were not spiritual until we came upon Christianity; that we were not educated until we came upon English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, German, Russian, Latin, and Greek languages, philosophies, literature, music, and other forms of art. That the only way we can move up in this world and become successful and live quality lives is if we align ourselves to numerous forms of supremacy: white supremacy, male supremacy, Christianity supremacy, cis supremacy, hetero supremacy, able-bodied supremacy, and if we worship models of organization and development that treat and relate to our environment and other peoples as resources for exploitation rather than as extensions of ourselves and our families; that we cannot become successful and live quality lives unless we uncritically bow down to arbitrarily defined forms of art regarded as masterpieces that reflect the very same supremacies I just mentioned. European art is high art, they say, while Indigenous art is folk art, for example.

This is how settler colonialism continues to shape our reality and our storytelling. In other words, to civilize the so-called “savage” was to eradicate tribal attachments and to kill the Indigenous, save the body, and infuse it with Euro-centric values so the bodies would become docile vessels, relegated to inferior positions, to be more easily coerced into benefitting the greed and satisfying the whims of Europeans and those of European descent without much resistance. These vessels would become more docile if settler-colonists molded them into their images.

This civilizing machine of settler colonialism has ruptured our place in the world for over 500 years; yet, we’re still here… resisting.

***

The first stories we experience are not novels or films. The first stories we experience are rooted in relationships. They are rooted in what we tell ourselves about ourselves, others, and our surroundings, which are also informed by what others tell us about ourselves, others, and our surroundings. These stories shape how we engage with our words and our worlds. These stories help determine whether we alienate and estrange ourselves, or whether we connect with ourselves. These stories help determine, to a large extent, how we will behave and how we interpret external and internal stimuli. All of this starts before we read our first book, write our first poems, or sing along to our first song.?

This means that it is extremely important for us to interrogate the gatekeepers of such stories… for us to unpack and dissect the frameworks of our society—those lenses that pass as common sense. We must shine a light on the roots of our cultural consciousness—its backdrop, social structures, agents, institutions, unspoken assumptions, and taken-for-granted ideologies.?

For example, let’s interrogate representation in mainstream storytelling. Invisibility is part of our current situation as Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color... those of us from the global majority. And, if we are visible at all, the situation tends to lean toward misrepresentation—limited, distorted, or false caricatures of who we are, were, and could be. Misrepresentations that may positively impact the psyches and imaginations of those benefiting from such oppressive systems, and misrepresentations that also negatively impact the psyches and imaginations of those targeted and subjugated within such dominant settler-colonial cultures. All of which create soil that makes it so fear and hatred can more easily grow against those who have been Otherized and devalued, which also include other realms of oppressed diversity dimensions like ethnicity, nativity, sex, gender, orientation, disability, religion, education, and class.

Let’s also dissect how the publishing industry’s focus on profit perpetuates colonial paradigms. Something we experience in many storytelling industries—be it film, the stage, the page, or radio—is a focus on perpetuating the status quo. We can see this in ways editors, agents, and publishers, for example, pander to the bigotries of the dominant culture, and try to disassociate themselves from their complicity with such systems of oppression by justifying their actions on the ethically hollow response that they are just “giving the people what they want.” Well, what the people want is not us. So, if it’s more profitable to pander to bigots that uphold oppressive colonial frameworks—such as racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc.—then they will flex their muscles to hold up such architecture.?

One thing we experience a lot from agents, editors, and publishers in the literary world is an insistence to change our stories, our characters, our names, and the topics we wish to discuss, in order to appease said bigotries because these literary agents, editors, and publishers do not want to make this target audience that drives the profits of their industry (as they perceive it, anyway) uncomfortable. So, what they ask of us is to, again, assimilate… to decenter and erase and dismember ourselves from our stories in order to make our stories more marketable to the very people who oppress us. Again, to kill the Native, but save the person so the body becomes a vessel for serving the interests of those benefiting from the status quo put in place and upheld by settler colonialism.

Further, there are genres they try to force us into, which limits our creativity if it cannot be marketed to such bigotries. Yet, those given the opportunity to experiment and explore and go beyond the boundaries of the status quo tend to be those who already benefit from it. These are just more forms of gatekeeping and forced or coerced assimilation.

Let’s take, for example, what is often taught as good writing: that stories should have a plot; a beginning, middle, and end, even if it’s not in that order. Earlier in the year, I spoke with India-based journalist Akanksha Singh about her essay "What if writing lost plot?" to continue to get her perspective. She said, “The idea of a ‘strong’ narrative arc (and plot) is something that is extremely culturally relative. So much so that it’s been erased in the very white and Western world of ‘good’ writing. Consider, for instance, how white writers—LeGuin and Woolf—can get away with plotless, arc-less stories and novels, where writers of color simply don’t. We’re familiar with these ‘avant garde’ forms, but largely when they come through the white/Western lens. It is, in my opinion, a very limited form,” she said. She even almost went as far as to say it (the limitation of stories having plots and narrative arcs) may be one of the reasons prose has not grown beyond the novel and short story.?

***

And as I continue my journey to connect with my Indigenous heritage, I am constantly reminded of the different forms of storytelling throughout all of our Indigenous communities that do not align themselves solely to the plot/narrative arc forms of storytelling.?

For example, according to Emily Aguilar, an arts educator and community leader working to ignite Indigenous sovereignty and gender and racial justice: “Euro-centric storytelling guidelines limit storyteller creativity. They also limit our understandings as recipients of stories. Some stories are shaped like an arc, but this isn’t the only way. Not all stories have a beginning, middle, and end. Not all stories have a main character. Some stories are shaped like water. Some stories flow. Some stories have multiple currents. Some stories are shaped like a tree. They have roots beneath the surface, visible and invisible elements, and we may see only part of the story. But we know it is vast and strong. It gives us so much to think about, long after the story is over. Some stories are shaped like wind. They ebb and flow. They have strong gusts and gentle breezes. You may not see a story, but all over your body you feel a story there. You see it moving others, too. Some stories are shaped like fire. They move quickly, they inspire strong feelings, they gather people around them. They may have teachings that show up quickly, or take time to see. Fire stories are sometimes short, making them the easiest to remember and pass on. Some stories are constellations. They connect us to other places and times. They leave us with more questions than answers. They reveal endless possibilities.”

Emily Aguilar continued to say that “there is no wrong way to shape a story. A story is a gift from Creator. Trying to change a story to fit Euro-centric models is disrespectful.” “Show gratitude,” she wrote, “by accepting the story as it comes to you, and allow learners to do the same.”

***

As a gatekeeper myself, both Singh and Aguilar, among many others, have gotten me to think about my inherent biases in writing and storytelling and curating, and where those biases came from. I needed to deconstruct and dissect my literary instincts even more. Gatekeepers are curators who end up creating stories as a result of their selection process, pretty similar to the power that historians and educators have.

For my process, after decades of doing this, I would catch myself trusting my instincts more and critically thinking about my selection process less. But I do go back to dissect the instinct to learn why I’m disposed in a specific manner, why I like certain arrangements, certain artistry, etc. But I need to dissect these instinctual, almost knee-jerk reactions, primarily because I, like everyone else, have ingrained biases and prejudices.

We are all born into dominant cultures, and, as a result, and to different degrees, are all products of this enculturation and socialization. So, when in social justice we discuss deconstructing, dismantling, rebuilding, unlearning, decolonizing, etc., our instincts also have to be dissected. Our instincts are exactly where we can identify our biases and prejudices. Our bodies, hearts, and minds tend to go to the trained and comfortable spaces of our being to help us survive and exist with minimal stress. Instincts, for me, are an extremely valuable source for decision making (like an athlete who trains themselves to produce one specific technical move thousands of times until they no longer have to think about it but can trust the mind and body to do it instinctively). Conversely, these knee-jerk reactions can also be the very specific identifiers of other ways we have also been trained to create other kinds of instincts, bigoted instincts, many times without us even knowing we were trained to react in a certain way.

This realization for me was both a benefit and a burden, and brought me lots of hesitation and many concerns as the leader of an organization like The Nasiona that is intentionally trying to challenge systems of oppression and dominant cultures. I say this because my team and I have all been trained in this settler colonial dominant culture to define “good” writing, for example, in a very specific way, which is ultimately a very Euro-centric colonial way of assigning value to what a “good story” is supposed to do, how it supposed to be arranged, whose comfort it is supposed to center, etc. Arranging anthologies and selecting essays for publication in our magazine, for example, are some of the areas where I have to constantly check myself and have others check me so we are aligned to The Nasiona’s mission more effectively.

***

So, what could decolonization look like for you, for me? I like how Indigenous media maker and environmental educator Nikki Sanchez answers this question.

She recommended that we can all take the first initial steps together by asking ourselves some questions and addressing a few things, like:

• Where did your people come from?
• How did you get here?
• Whose land are you on? What has been done to them for you to occupy their land?
• Address the oppressive systems and histories that enable you to occupy the territory you do now.
• Find out how you benefit from that history and activate one strategy wherein you can use your privilege from which to dismantle that.
• Share the knowledge that the work of decolonization is for everyone.?

Sanchez also highlights the value of decolonizing. We should do this work because:

• decolonization helps you live without paralyzing guilt/shame of your identity and the social identity you have inherited.
• decolonization helps you give up social and economic power and privilege that directly disempowers, appropriates, and invisibilizes others.
• decolonization helps you dismantle patriarchy.
• decolonization helps you do the work to find out who you are, where you came from, and how you got here, and commit to building communities that work together to find out where we are going (together) and what our individual roles and responsibilities are in this process.
• decolonization helps you celebrate who we are and connect with the unique knowledge we each bring to work together to solve our global challenges.

***

As I stated earlier, I come from the Audre Lorde tradition in that my work with The Nasiona embodies the recognition that our silence will not protect us. Our silence will not protect us from a world designed to subjugate so many of us. If we remain quiet, and if you remain quiet, these ingrained instincts and biases and prejudices will steer our stories and how we curate them and how we assign them value.

One question I ask myself repeatedly as a storyteller and as a gatekeeper is: How can we reimagine and redesign and free ourselves from the shackles and limitations of colonial storytelling? The Nasiona was my response to that question.

The Nasiona is a movement that centers, elevates, and amplifies the personal stories of those Othered by systems of oppression and dominant cultures. Our work centers decolonization, liberation, empowerment, healing, and transformation. Through our magazine, podcast, publishing house, music series, mentorship program, fellowships, live events, along with other initiatives and partnerships (like this one), we strive to humanize the Other. We look to erase borders, tackle taboos, resist conventions, explore the known and unknown, and to rename ourselves to claim ourselves. We believe that the subjective can offer its own reality and reveal truths some so-called facts cannot discover. From liminal lives to the marginalized, and everything in between, we promote personal stories and conduct interviews that explore the spectrum of human experience through an intersectional lens.

Our initiatives and series, for example, have so far centered the following communities and topics: Being Latina/e/o/x; Being LGBTQIAA+; Diaspora and Immigration; Being Mixed Race; Womanhood and Trauma; BIPOC Musical Artists; Disability, Mental Health, and Chronic Conditions; Deconstructing Dominant Cultures; and Stories on Human Connection and Disconnection. We are consistently always working on something.

All of this is to say that “We confront in order to connect.” According to Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., this is also “the legacy of James Baldwin. The troubles we’re in are deeper than we thought because the troubles are in us, which requires us to be vulnerable. The autobiographical is the point of entry into the global context.”

By centering the autobiographical in everything we do at The Nasiona—and who we pass the mic to and advocate for—are some of the main ways we are actively working toward decolonizing and indigenizing storytelling: by centering, elevating, and amplifying the voices, histories, and experiences of those who have been exploited, marginalized, undervalued, overlooked, silenced, and forgotten by settler-colonial systems of oppression and dominant cultures.

We are intentionally changing the landscape by including the excluded, making visible those who’ve been erased and misrepresented, allowing them to speak their own truths, and we take those truths and amplify them by using different platforms and through different initiatives and partnerships so we can inundate the culture with these stories.

In doing so, we are normalizing a new normal in storytelling industries and spaces; and we are creating a space for healing, transformation, community, connection, and empowerment. I want to use my influence and power in the storytelling and social justice worlds to remove barriers and create new situations where survivors of settler colonialism can take off their masks and stop worrying about assimilating and code-switching to be accepted or to be treated with the respect they deserve. And in this liberating space, I want them to feel and be safe enough, encouraged enough, welcomed enough, and supported enough for them to be liberated to be their authentic selves without hurdles, fear, or shame. They, and we, will be better off for it, and so will our stories, thereby leaving a different storytelling legacy of which we can all be proud.

***

The longer I work with said communities, the more it becomes apparent that settler colonialism and imperialism have transformed many parts of the world, leaving a legacy of violence, trauma, and destruction. The “civilizing” machine of settler colonialism has ruptured the place of many of us in this world, which includes our relationships with ourselves, others, our environment, and our life activity, work, and creative pursuits.

We have to be very cognizant of the fact that colonialism and imperialism do not simply use force to dominate. As Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism understood, imperialism can continue to influence colonies and former colonial territories via how they employ culture to control distant lands and people, because storytelling and literature have “the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging,”?which might contradict or perpetuate the colonization of a people.

In the words of Yankon Dakota writer, editor, translator, musician, educator, and political activist Zitkála-?á: “A wee child toddling in a wonder world, I prefer to their dogma my excursions into natural gardens where the voice of the Great Spirit is heard in the twittering of birds, the rippling of mighty waters, and the sweet breathing of flowers. If this is Paganism, then at present, at least, I am a Pagan.”

Zitkála-?á had a vision for Indigenous peoples that I have adopted as a vision for all of the peoples The Nasiona serves: a continued evolution rather than a fossilized past. An evolving translation and community preservation.

So, with The Nasiona, we elevate ourselves and say, “Enough!” And in the process of disentangling ourselves from relationships of abuse, we reinvent ourselves to reclaim ourselves. We set boundaries that center our needs as a form of self-love. With these raw, real, and personal stories, we constitute a statue of personhood, our personhood―humanizing ourselves―blending our scars with our strengths and our vision for ourselves, rejecting the lies that had previously depicted us as lesser than.?

With The Nasiona we rise and become a revolutionary scaffold that centers us. Our own healing and self-validation: a form of resistance. We take up space and take control of our stories and tell them in our own ways. We remind others that it is okay to love themselves and to lose themselves in their own embrace. And in that cradle, we deconstruct our form, rebuilding it into something that makes more sense to us.

In our defiance, we force ourselves to not only behold our stories but storytelling as a whole, creating the conditions for us to also dissect our literary instincts and other borders of abuse that have colonized our bodies, minds, and hearts.

Through my work and the work of The Nasiona, we hope to inspire our readers, listeners, and followers to also experiment with their own lives and communities in order to create beyond the limits of the forces that have for far too long told us to sit down, shut up, and follow the rules.?

Our silences will not protect us. So, I speak, and I help others speak, and I will take the consequences as they come.

---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----

Acknowledgements:

• I am grateful to Akanksha Singh for our conversation and her thoughts on cultural relativity in storytelling. Akanksha helped me further dissect how deeply ingrained colonialism is in our instincts and how they connect to the white gaze in publishing. The awareness of this direct link is very important, especially for those of us storytelling gatekeepers who have committed to a process of naturalizing Indigenous knowledge systems and making them evident to transform spaces, places, and hearts. As someone who is intentionally reviving, revitalizing, and continuing indigenous ideas, concepts, and practices, I also have to check myself. I, too, have been a survivor of forced acculturation and socialization. The sad reality is that after hundreds of years of European settler colonialism's attempt to "kill the Indian but save the man," many of us are still healing from the erasure and the internalized racism and xenophobia that are direct consequences of cultural genocide.
• Thank you to Rigorous Magazine for publishing my poem, "The Wind," in its Volume 5, Issue 2. Rigorous?is an online journal highlighting the works of authors, artists, critics, and educators of color. According to Rigorous, "We take our name from an accusation commonly leveled at authors of color—that our works are not as rigorous as works created by white authors. We add our voices; we continue to prove otherwise."
• I originally published "A Continued Evolution Rather Than a Fossilized Past: Decolonizing Storytelling," in?All My Relations, Volume 2: Colonization & Decolonization, pp. 44-58, February 2022. Thank you to Chris Talbot , Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of All My Relations, Volume 2: Colonization & Decolonization, for publishing this piece.
• In November 2021, I gave an earlier version of my auto-ethnographic essay, "A Continued Evolution Rather Than a Fossilized Past: Decolonizing Storytelling," as a Texas A&M, San Antonio, virtual public talk entitled "Decolonizing and Indigenizing Storytelling." Thank you to Dr. Alexandra Rodriguez Sabogal and Dr. Katherine Gillen (chair of the Department of Language, Literature, and Arts at Texas A&M, San Antonio) for all of the hours of preparation they put into making the event happen.
• Also thank you to Myrna Garza (chair of Native American Heritage Month Committee at Texas A&M, San Antonio) and Dr. Tamara Hinojosa and the President’s Commission on Equity at Texas A&M, San Antonio, for their work and support of the "Decolonizing and Indigenizing Storytelling" event.
• Thank you to Texas A&M, San Antonio’s Spanish, Bilingual Education, Mexican-American and Latinx Studies, Communication, English, and First Year Experience programs for making the "Decolonizing and Indigenizing Storytelling" event possible.
• Gracias to the entire Texas A&M, San Antonio, cohort and everyone who attended the event virtually from around the world.