a search for home
2020-present
fighting for, acquiring, and then losing land. after rest and reflection, searching again.
From 2021-2023, I helped save over 600 trees and 1.5 acres of green space in South Seattle. So many things have happened since then: endometriosis surgery, being asked to leave the nonprofit that purchased the land, and talking publicly about my abusive childhood. The time since then - challenging, dark, and seismic - has led me to a more balanced, peaceful, and honest place.
I have the land to thank for that.
Even though I no longer have safe-feeling access to it, I know the land knows how I feel. I looked for it for two years, doing lonely drives, Zillow searches - all in all, I looked at and visited a dozen parcels, all of them beautiful, all of them sacred, to find one where I could envision community members coming to gather.
A rainy day in May 2022: I saw it for the first time. By then, I had applied to the grants that gifted us $1.96m. We had the money. When I met the land that afternoon, hopping the front fence and walking into its canopy, I knew.
It was the hardest blessing. A reckoning, a lesson, a friend. For the next six months, as I led the fight against developers who wanted to turn the land into ten luxury houses in the fastest gentrifying neighborhood in South Seattle, as I watched my own health deteriorate over the stress of the situation, I visited it weekly. Walking through overgrown ivy and trees, I saw the vision so clearly. Which I know now is my gift. To see possibility where other people don’t.
I hand-wrote letters to neighbors and knocked on doors, hoping to have conversations about what people wanted to see in their neighborhood. Reached out to business associations, went to online meetings. But mostly, I fought (my other gift). The developers. The city. Myself.
On Dec 26 2022, we closed on the land. By the time we got to this milestone, I was seeing multiple specialists to deal with my increasing autoimmune issues, all of which were coming from prolonged stress and a lack of sleep and care for my body. I had come to the conclusion, with the help of my doctors (one of whom said: “You know where this road leads. It leads to you dying.”), that I needed to leave the organization as it was currently structured.
After it became clear that the organization was unwilling to meet me where I was, less than two weeks after we closed on the land, which had been a dream that I had fought for and spearheaded for over three years, less than a month out from a necessary surgery that would leave me out of work, and therefore without income, for at least three months,
I left the organization as a worker and attempted to be solely a board member, of which I was then co-president alongside Kimberly Corinne Deriana (Mandan & Hidatsa). This also ended up being too much of an emotional and physical commitment for me post-surgery, and with a heavy heart, a few weeks before Kimberly did the same, I tendered my resignation from the board.
Given everything that has happened since the land acquisition, I sometimes wonder if it was worth it. But even in my most dark moments, when I reflect on what this fight cost me, with how little I gained, I always remember the trees. The soil. The water. I remember that I did it for them. Just as they have cared for me my whole life, I was able to care for them.
For that, I regret nothing. <3
Since then, I have spent two years in intensive therapy for my c-PTSD, caring for my body with an amazing care team, and moved to the East Coast and am looking to acquire land to steward and care for in Vermont. I am in the midst of several grant processes that could give me around $150,000 to purchase 50-75 acres of previously logged land in dire need of rehabilitation and care. My longterm goal is to build a place for myself to live off the grid, with the eventual goal of having several small cabins where artists could come to have residencies or care for themselves.
In one of my grant applications, I said the following:
Asking for money to buy land for myself feels like such an act of hubris. And yet, when I raised two million dollars for the organization I used to co-run, it felt like a duty, an obligation. To ask felt like my right. I guess, in so many ways, I have dared to dream only through my community work. It is most likely a combination of social conditioning and that same pesky survivor’s guilt, but in the past, I have transposed my personal dreams into ones that could serve the community. It felt like the natural thing, the fair thing. The only thing.
It takes courage, vulnerability to say, “I want this for me.” I am afraid of being scoffed at. Laughed at. So much of my life has taught me that to self-advocate is to be seen as a nuisance. Instead, I have made a career of asking for things, persuasively and with great success, on behalf of my community.
Finally, I am asking for me.
—
One of my deepest artistic inquiries is the question of what it might mean to be rooted. Of what unrootedness does to a people. My family was displaced from the tribal hills outside of Lahore to the rural plains outside Gurdaspur during the Panjabi partition as religious refugees, then again displaced to rural Illinois through the economic coercion of globalization. Again and again, we have fled, due to economic hardship or a sense of unbelonging. By the time I was 30, I had moved 32 times.
This kind of unmooring feels like a generational curse. And I am ready to be rid of it.
–
If granted this money, I would be able to spend a year with the land, rather than working away from the land in order to pay for it.
Within the fellowship term, I will enroll the land in the Vermont land use program, work with local tribes to come up with a post-mortem return of the land to Native stewardship, and collaborate with local knowledge holders (park rangers, ecologists, Indigenous land stewards) in order to create an account of what is already on the land, as well as collaborating on a long-term care strategy for the animals and plants living on it.
I want to witness the land in every season and get to know it before collaborating with architect friends to come up with a plan for a small, off-grid, carbon negative living structure as well as an accompanying studio and composting outhouse that I will make by hand with materials found or grown on the land, and I will begin to work on larger ‘earth works’ on the land, which, this early on in the project, will really just be unobtrusive paths carved into the mountain side to help me navigate the terrain, stone retaining walls to assist in establishing native plantings in areas that have previously been disseminated by logging, and the pruning and managing of invasive species.
This kind of work is not only becoming more and more a part of my art practice, but it enlivens my more traditional studio practice, and is a critical part of my journey of caring for and maintaining a chronically ill body.
In this way, this fellowship year would enable me to:
1. develop and formalize a new, and deeply important, part of my practice
2. reinforce my existing studio practice, and
3. help me manage my chronic illness and continue my healing journey
—
At the end of my life, I want three things: A studio full of work I can give my loved ones, a long dinner table full of friends and family, and a landscape I live amongst with familiarity, routine, and comfort.
I have known this dream since I was 20. I told a friend, in secret, over a late dinner in my shitty off-campus apartment. I could picture it all so clearly. Dogs and friends and friends’ children and trees and birds and a greenhouse and a small, dirty studio all side-by-side. I can picture it now. The picture has not changed. It has only become clearer.
And in that time, I have been preparing for this future, in my quiet, often circuitous way. I have worked on three farms, each bigger than the last. I have hiked and backpacked with just my dog. I have built a small living structure myself. I even, for a short time, lived off the grid in a small cabin situated in the middle of thousands of acres of uninhabited desert in Northeastern Nevada. It was me, my dogs, a compost toilet, a few solar panels, and a rain catchment system in a two room cabin. No internet, no cell service, 30 miles of tedious off-road driving between me and the closest cell tower.
Truly: I have never been happier. Was I scared? Yes. Did I face some challenges? Yes. Did I sob uncontrollably when I left? Have I dreamt of that silence, darkness, peace ever since? Yes, yes, yes.
—
It is easy for me to fall into a kind of nihilistic despair about myself. Given all of my chronic conditions, given my lived childhood experience, there can sometimes be a cavernous sadness in my body. A weight on my chest that feels truly physical. But when it comes to the earth, for the living beings on it, I feel so much hope and so much potential. It comes to me easily, abundantly, ecsatically.
I don’t know why. I am only grateful.
—
So much of my life has been a fight against. Systems, institutions - in reaction to. It is only now that I am trying to live my life not against anything, instead, in service of. Not a taut fisted, steely eyed resistance, but an open armed, deep breath leaning towards.
Everyday, I try to move towards a life that, while incidentally against capitalism, feels only like tipping my body precariously and fearlessly towards life and joy and meaning. On the very edges of my toes, my arms waving at my sides for balance. A combination of elation and fear.
In this reorientation, I have started to find the most natural, easy, free way to spend my days. There are, it turns out, so many things to live for. In its baseline, literal definition, isn’t this the true meaning of revolution? (A turning towards, a turning away)
The last tree standing in a forest otherwise decimated holds and grieves the memory of her fallen family, surely. But she reaches for the sky, opens her face to the sun, grows her seeds and digs deeper into the soil regardless. I am only trying to do the same.