This campaign is to assist with my tuition expense for the Decolonizing Knowledge and Power summer school in Spain this July.

I'm an Indigenous woman completing a degree in bioanthropology. My entire educational experience has been one where the history and knowledge of my ancestors has been minimized if not erased. European invasion of our homelands is characterized as a discovery, rather than a violent disruptor. I sit in class and hear my people described as "primitive" on a regular basis. It's a rare event when a professor will talk at length about our genocide, and that is often framed as a past event. My field allowed science to be co-opted to justify racism, and little remedial work has been done to atone for that.

Everything I know about decolonization has been learned from other Indigenous activists and scholars whom I've connected with online. Hawaiian sovereignty activist Poka Laenui describes the 5 phases of decolonization as:

1. Rediscovery and recovery
2. Mourning
3. Dreaming
4. Commitment
5. Action

People who are decolonizing can be in multiple phases at once, and I recognize myself at 1 and 2 at the present. My academic goals are centered around issues that affect the well-being and autonomy of Indigenous people, and how anthropology can be a conduit for deconstructing and dismantling settler colonialism, rather than an enabler of it. But Western academia respects and responds to a certain type of language, and in order to learn to speak that language better I have to immerse myself in it.

There's a certain irony in the fact that I have to travel to Spain, the nation-state that initiated the European invasion of Turtle Island, in order to study decolonization. But here's the kicker: some of my ancestors were Spanish. I have the blood of the colonizer and the colonized running in my veins, as do many Indigenous people. My hope is that in going to Spain to learn how to better analyze and articulate the oppression that Indigenous people continue to suffer, I can reconcile with those ancestors and the legacy of their actions.

Moving out of mourning and into dreaming is a path for me to empower all my relations, both Indigenous and European; collective liberation brings all of us out of a 500-year-old cycle of destruction. I've spent the last several years doing public education around harm reduction, settler colonialism, and Indigenous rights. I've invested blood, sweat, and tears (lots of those) into my community, because that is where real change happens. It's incredibly difficult for me to ask for donations, but I cannot get to this summer school without assistance.

The actual cost of my tuition is 1300 Euros, not U.S. dollars. I still have to come up with travel and accommodation expenses apart from this fundraiser. But 13 is the number of the Goddess, and that is why I chose it, for good luck. No amount is too small, even a couple dollars gets me a little closer to dreaming. Thank you.