Afro-indigeneity and the Importance of Our Stories
A recap of our first Tea Talk of the season, highlighting BIPOC women perspectives on the importance of storytelling within our communities
Recap by Sydónne Blake
Last month, we had the beautiful opportunity to share space with a group of Afro-Indigenous, Colombian women who came to the farm to speak about storytelling, culture, and our roles in a world that is always changing. Coming to our farm through a collaboration with World Denver, each of the 5 women journalists/storytellers were eager to share stories about the intersections of racial justice and media and to unearth the connections between Indigenous experiences in the United States and Colombia. That quiet morning, we were greeted by such a warm embrace of these open, kind and intelligent women each deep into their careers as activists, storytellers, and organizers.
We want to hold space to introduce them:
From Left to Right:
Daniela Durán
Vanessa Marquez Mena
Diana Jembuel Morales
Leidy Palacios Dinas
Karina Esther Madrid Murillo
Karina Esther Madrid Murillo
Karina Esther Madrid Murillo is the host and director of “Isla Bonita,” a program on Teleislas, the sole television channel on the island of San Andrés. During her 16-year career at Teleislas, she has focused on uncovering challenges faced by the people of San Andrés. Despite being a key tourist destination, many residents, especially the Raizal community, must often leave San Andrés to search for career opportunities in other parts of Colombia. These limited prospects have motivated Karina to share her knowledge and empower and mentor young people to pursue opportunities in journalism to tell their stories.
Diana Jembuel Morales
Diana Mery Jembuel is a journalist for the independent digital media outlet, Agenda Propia, which covers social issues in Indigenous communities of Latin America. She is experienced in leading Indigenous, territorial, and community communication strategies, with a focus on gender issues. Ms. Jembuel is committed to preserving communication and expression within Indigenous communities, particularly through oral traditions. She has been nationally recognized for her work to raise awareness about her community, the Misak people, earning her awards including “Best Indigenous Journalist in Colombia.” Diana is also an instructor of political communications and a member of the Guambia Council’s General Secretariat, which manages, protects, and advocates for the interests of the Misak people.
Vanessa Marquez Mena
Vanessa Marquez Mena serves as the Director and Host for the Colombian House of Representatives’ news program. She has gained recognition as a leading figure in Afro-Colombian journalism, dedicating herself to promoting diversity and empowering underrepresented voices. In addition, Ms. Marquez is the founder of Vive Afro, a digital magazine that promotes the visibility, perspectives, and achievements of the Afro-Colombian community. Prior to her current role, she was the communications coordinator for the Department of Cultural Extension at the University of Antioquia.
Leidy Palacios Dinas
Leidy Tatiana Palacios is a journalist and host for the Telepacífico channel, where she serves as an interviewer and news anchor for the regional and national program “Buenaventura Suena A,” in addition to researching, implementing, and hosting a variety of projects. She also serves as a news anchor for Canal Origen, an initiative of Telepacífico and the Government of Valle, and the first public channel in Colombia’s Pacific region. The channel was launched in 2019 to promote the Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities.
Daniela Viveros Durán
Daniela Viveros Durán serves as the Communications Advisor for ProColombia, a government agency that promotes non-traditional exports, international tourism, and foreign investment. In her role, she designs and implements digital communication strategies, anchors the organization’s news program, hosts ceremonies, and produces podcasts and video content on business communication. Additionally, she manages social media strategies for ProColombia’s president across several platforms to foster engagement with diverse audiences. Daniela has also worked as a radio host and community manager for a regional radio station in Cundinamarca. In 2019, she oversaw a series of digital journalism workshops, actively training over 1,000 journalists and content creators in 16 departments throughout Colombia. She also played a crucial role in creating and launching the National Digital Journalism Award.
Estamos muy agradecidos por el tiempo que pasamos juntos.
We sat down to a table set with sweet treats, vibrant colors, fresh flowers, and a tall pitcher of sorrel (aka jamaica, hibiscus, roselle). As the women were seated, they spoke to the comfort of gathering around a table together and of sharing a drink that holds familiarity across our cultures (a connection between Jamaica and Colombia). I was reminded That is what community should do, welcome each other to the table with an expression of our shared experiences. Acknowledging the unspoken thought that we are more similar than we are different.
On Afro - Indigineity
If this triggers you: You may need to come to terms with your anti-blackness.
Afro-Indigenous people are at face value people who hold both African and Indigenous heritage. Both identities share complex histories and narratives of resilience that have transcended multiple generations of violence and extraction. Both identities also hold a medicine, a sort of magic or recipe for healing that has been threaded through generations.
It’s important to understand that being one does not make one less of the other. In several Indigenous cultures, including my own, we believe that beings have the capacity to exist as many things at once--- rather than being finite containers with categorizations that break us into fractions or percentages, we are actually infinite beings with the capacity to be a part of everything that we touch and have met, even a part of those who came before us. Afro-Indigenous people cannot be quantified or categorized by federal systems. We are many. Often, the language for us has been removed and repackaged from society, a cue to other people’s discomfort. But many of us are honored to uphold our identities and assert that we are here. My own people, the Yamaye Taíno, were a part of what we call the “paper genocide” where we were literally written out of the census and therefore out of history. But our stories persist, passed through our relatives and the lands on which we have lived, honoring our blackness and our indigeneity in equal measure. As Afro-indigenous people, we are a part of the land in the most intimate of ways, physically and spiritually bound to the earth in one of the most beautifully enduring stories in history. And as such, our stories should not be erased. We will continue to share our own stories in this space and many others as we continue forward on the road to healing. In other words, leave your anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity at the door. Amen!
As we sat together, we spoke about how farming, teaching, and storytelling are all the same thing by different names.
As farmers, we tell our stories through the land as she listens and speaks through us. Our narratives are interwoven with the land and we can trace every chapter of our histories in her forms. All our ancestors are literally within the land we are a part of. When we move from this life, we join the soil, the air, the water, and are breathed, drank, embodied into new life. With this understanding, we learn from the land as one of our oldest ancestors and teachers, holding so many lessons for us to each form our own understanding. Yet this form of learning is only possible when you first learn how to listen and how to speak a language that is sometimes non-verbal and often evolving. We often speak about "deep listening" in theory, but the practice of it can be challenging in a world with so much buzzing. This education from the land, each other, and our inner voices as teacher is equally humbling and rewarding. As we are some of the youngest beings on Earth, we are learning lessons constantly--- often hard ones. And as we continue to tell stories, it is our hope that we may do so through the land. What can we teach someone about healing by watching a plant grow? What stories do we rely on to make sense of this world?
We spoke of cultural autonomy, erasure, and resilience.
Telling stories is an ancestral practice, rooted in a desire to share knowledge and art. It's through stories that we come to understand the world around us and attach meaning to all that we know, think and feel. In times of war and violence, it becomes even more important that we share our stories in the moments when our oppressors are trying to drown us out. Silencing Black and Indigenous voices is an act of erasure, an act of violence. It can only be remedied by us unifying our voices and speaking louder. The way that our stories, our art, our music persists through generations of exploitation and removal speaks to our resilience. We often hear of the "stolen generation" referring to Indigenous people on Turtle Island who were forced into boarding schools as a means of cultural assimilation and genocide. But there are so many stolen generation(s) of people. The link between us and them are the stories they have protected and shared, the ones that were whispered to us like soft prayers in our youth, telling us of how the world once was and what we could become in the future. Sometimes delivering warnings. Those stories were incantations, alchemy. Like a curse for our oppressors or a blessing for the next generation. While we sat at the table on the farm, I shared the thought, "We decided that we should have ownership over our own minds and our stories, if nothing else." Stories from my grandmothers have felt like my birthright, my legacy, my own "generational wealth". And I believe there's a key to our healing within stories, part of the medicine. Helen often speaks of dreaming into a more healed future or different ways of being. Those are the stories we must continue to tell, as well.
We spoke of moving back to short-form, print media in a world of digital communications.
Lately, we've seen a resurgence of zines and printed media. These pamphlets are nothing new, but rather echo the many other grassroots movements for abolition and change often with Black and Brown people at the helm. Distributing important information or ideas at a local level, going door to door, passing out pamphlets that can be reproduced at an affordable cost. Printed media allows us to be collaborative in our storytelling while also allowing us to hold our stories in our hands-- a type of autonomy that is often removed from the digital realm where a story can be ripped away from its origin and repackaged thousands of times within a matter of minutes. What happens in the repackaging can be harmful: our narratives twisted into something we can't recognize, our words redacted, blacked out, our visibility cloaked by AI that reflects the biases of its makers. Our physical stories are like a form of protection. We are able to directly fight back against censorship in a way that is local and contextual. People on the ground in a community, trading ideas and telling their stories together through art, and sharing those words with their neighbors and friends. It feels like a special thing. What are some zines that you've been loving lately?
We were left with so many threads after our conversation,
some which we’d like to share with our community:
What does it mean to move through the world as young women of color and to assert our existence?
How do we decide what is truth?
How do we value and uplift young voices in community-driven work?
How do we build trust as we move forward in this work with community?
How do we sustain this work?
There wasn’t enough time to ask all of the questions we wanted to ask or to share all of the things that we wished to share, but we are still connecting with the women after their visit to continue the conversation, to continue pulling threads.
We were able to connect with Daniela after the converation to ask a few more questions which are recorded below:
Sydónne: What brought you to telling stories?
Daniela: It is necessary to amplify the voice and legacy of the people who have built a legendary path from different fronts. From a very young age I discovered that stories are really powerful because they inspire new dreams. So you could say that I decided to tell stories for two reasons: the first is to show that not all voices were taken into account and someone has to do that job. On the other hand, I tell stories because I believe that knowing the path of others inspires us to build our own path. Es necesarios amplificar la voz y el legado de las personas que han construido un camino legendario desde diferentes frentes. Desde muy pequeña descubrí que las historias son realmente poderosas porque inspiran nuevos sueños. Así que podría decir que decidí contar historias por dos razones: la primera es el describir que no todas las voces eran tenidas en cuenta y alguien tiene que hacer ese trabajo. Por otro lado, cuento historias porque creo que conocer el camino de otros nos inspira a construir nuestro propio camino.
S: What are the challenges of being a black woman journalist in Colombia?
D: There are different challenges, I highlight the fact that in our country there are still stereotypes imposed on our image and our behavior and on what we are supposed to do or how we should behave due to our black roots. Today in Colombia, Afro-descendant men and women journalists are working to blur these stereotypes and create more spaces for everyone. Existen diferentes desafíos, destaco el hecho de que en nuestros país aún existen estereotipos impuestos sobre nuestra imagen y nuestro comportamiento y sobre lo que se supone que debemos hacer o como deberíamos comportarnos gracias a nuestras raíces negras. Hoy en Colombia los periodistas hombres y mujeres Afrodescendientes estamos trabajando por desdibujar esos estereotipos, y crear más espacios para todos.
S: What advice do you have for storytellers here in the U.S.?
D: My big advice is: let's continue believing in what moves our hearts. Someone once said “speak about your village and you will be universal” I firmly believe in that, it is necessary for young people to continue talking about our roots and our environment.
Another message I would like to convey is: it does not matter that you have not yet found your great purpose in life, do not let yourself be scared by the lack of certainties. Take one day at a time with the conviction that you are going in the right direction when you work to make this planet a better place. Mi gran consejo es: sigamos creyendo en lo que nos mueve el corazón. Alguien alguna vez dijo “habla sobre tu aldea y serás universal” yo creo firmemente en eso, es necesario que los jóvenes sigamos hablando de nuestras raíces h nuestro entorno. Otro mensaje que me gustaría transmitir es: no importa que aún no encuentres tu gran propósito en la vida, no te dejes asustar por la falta de certezas. Camina un día a la vez con la convicción de que vas en la dirección correcta cuando trabajas por hacer de este planeta un lugar mejoró.
Thank you Daniela for sharing your thoughts with community. We will continue to share these women's voices and their stories as we deepen relationships. Check back in for more!