The Widda Experiance
Hej Hej, jag heter Sara, och idag vill jag berätta en historia.
(Hey Hey, my name is Sara and today I will teach you a history)
Hello, my name is Sara de Widda, I go by she/he/we.
First, a bit of introduction. This project was created for my Social Change class.
At PSU I am pursuing my BA in Archaeology with a focus on pre-Christian European Women because I believe if we teach European Women their own pre christian colonization Indigenous histories they will stop appropriating them from others.
My life focus outside academia has been to show people the true and painful history of colonialism and what it has done to our souls.
My goal this quarter was been to help a beautiful sister of mine who is building a website that is about giving marginalized people their voice. As the effects of 2020 are still in action, that got sidetracked to helping a beautiful sister of mine find her own voice and peace again, which will in turn build that website that gives others voice.
As such I will not be speaking today on the website or on my sisters life, as it is not mine to voice. I will instead be speaking on how my activism works.
I am a mixed Indigenous Two Spirited human. My direct maternal line ends with Hester who escaped slavery pregnant in the 1750's. Her daughters and granddaughters married the sons and grandsons of Nani of the Red Paint Clan Eastern Band Cherokee, and Poly who was enrolled as Quapaw. Philomena's line stayed slaves till the end of the civil war. These are the ties to here and Africa.
In Eurasia I trace my ancestry directly to Charlemagne, to Hrafnr Floki, who founded Iceland, and the Celtic peoples of both Britain and Ireland, the Gaul's, the Finns, and Mongolia.
I study and practice who all of them were prior to Christian colonization.
The language I opened with was Swedish, one of my direct ancestral languages that I speak.
The name Widda is the ancient Gaelic for Feminine knowledge. It is the female half of the Druids. These were the doctors, lawyers, priests, teachers, and law givers of the ancient Gaelic people who stretch from Iberia to Ireland.
My words and prayers and actions, with intention, come from my global indigenous heritage in a mix of how all my Ancestors connected to their Ancestors and the Mother. It is my belief that I should uplift all of my relations.
I was raised outside of America, on Turtle Island.
The name Turtle Island is used by the Potawatomi people, and others, for this continent before it was America, and is used by many today to distinguish.
Born in the Islands of the Coastal Salish and raised in the Mountains of the Yakima, my mother taught me a non westernized education. My first books were histories and archaeologies written by those who were trying to tell the truth of what happened to their people. That was my only "Western" education. Everything else I was taught from Elders telling stories in circles as my mother raised me among the Haida, Skagit, Swinomish peoples, while inviting Sundancers from the Lakota territories to her lodge.
I was taught medicine and my connection to the Mother at my mothers heel as she honorably harvested the medicines she used.
The few times I went to American schools ( I also spent a year in an Iranian Muslim school that was escaping Iran in the early 80's and settled near us) I was correcting the teachers on their history.
My kindergarten teacher was not happy with the class being told Columbus murdered people and we shouldn't celebrate him. It was 1983, as you can imagine this was not a rural American take.
I was raised outside America until I was 12.
Once I came into "America" I still looked to histories that were not written by the European Colonizers of this land.
I do not study American history at all, I never have. I have studied Turtle Island Indigenous history from an Indigenous perspective. I have studied Black history on Turtle Island from a Black perspective. I could care less about your cowboys or tycoons of industry except to say that Manifest Destiny is an excuse for genocide. And I am always really offended with how history has treated Turtle Island Indigenous peoples and Black peoples in this country, so much so, I usually throw those books in frustration when I try.
Because of this, my histories are the real real. They are the truth that critical race theory tries to teach. They are what happened from the not white washed perspective.
As such.
I give content warning.
History is taken to be "Written Record". It is what is written. It ignores all other record of the past to be less because it wasn't written in a way European's could understand. This is in itself a very egotistical thought process, and stems in whole, to my mind to Greek nasty (whole other conversation).
My histories of Turtle Island start with the Taino peoples. Not because they are the oldest of the peoples, not because they are the most important of the peoples. Because they are the first peoples of the Turtle Islands effected by History as written record. They are the first people here that European's slaughtered.
Today I bring you an excerpt of my work.
History the First.
I am writing to you from the lands of the Atfalati, Cowlitz, Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, and the Kalapuya peoples. I give acknowledgement that this land belongs to these tribes and is currently under occupation from a foreign government who has placed the peoples whose land it is into internment camps where they receive little access to arable land, enforcing starvation compounded by a lack of water access while it continues to steal their children.
I ask that it is acknowledged that this government is foreign, that through ignoring treaties, sovereignty, and basic rights including that to life, this government has continued a genocide that at its most generous description rivals the foreign Holocaust we speak of while ignoring the ongoing one on our shores.
I ask that you acknowledge the thriving peoples of these tribes that still exist with in this space, in beautiful resilience forced upon them, and open your heart to what is going on today when these peoples go with out water in the hottest summer in history.
Thank you for taking a moment to acknowledge that before you move on.
You might understand this as a space in what is currently known as Portland Oregon.
The first tool for your new understanding I am going to give you is a website where you can find out what peoples belonged to the land you currently occupy. This website, https://native-land.ca/ and shows all the currently known Indigenous peoples of the world and with a simple entering of where you live you can find out who’s land you exist on.
Why is this important?
Land Acknowledgement is important. Unless your ancestors lived here before 1492, you are occupying stolen land.
I don’t think I can express to you this concept and understanding enough. The vast majority of America belongs to a religion that teaches that Stealing and Murder are wrong. Those two things are against American laws and considered foundational. Yet, those two things are the foundation of this country.
We talk about slavery, not enough and not in depth enough, yet we very rarely to never talk about the people who lived here before 1492 and their grandchildren who you meet at the grocery store and tell to go back where they came from. (See ranting Karen in black and white stripes on youtube last year calling a Native Woman a Mexican and telling her to go back to where she came from… The reaction is quite satisfying.)
When we do have these conversations, we have this conversation as “They WERE”
The American government has worked so hard to erase the people Indigenous to Turtle Island to the point that during the election last year some states posted results from poles as; White people, Black people, Mexican people, and Something Else.
We live in current erasure of the peoples whose land America is currently continuing to steal, American's have decided that while Indigenous peoples to Turtle Island live, thrive, survive in the space America forced them into, they don’t exist.
So Americans can benefit.
I ask you to see this.
And then to look in your mirror and ask yourself if this is something you are ok with.
I want you to hold onto your answer for longer then 15 minutes.
In 1492 Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue.
A pneumonic poem to teach grade school kids that manifest destiny was a valid reason for genocide.
And I mean Genocide.
I need you to under stand that we are not even talking about genocide on a modern idea which is in fact quite tame.
Tame.
We are talking about roasting babies over the fire while their parents watched.
Flaying people alive.
Today the world sees when genocide happens, no one saw this. Except the Spanish and the Taino.
Today, one is forced by science to understand that there are humans standing on the other side.
The people who governed that in 1492 was the Church.
The church told the Spanish that the Taino were not human because they didn’t worship God.
Columbus named them “Los Ninos de la Endeo” meaning the Children of God, even being the children of God did not stop Columbus though.
He described the Taino as Children of God because they lived in a tended garden, recorded in his journals as what walking through Edan must have been like. They were kind and generous and welcoming. From their small villages to their Cities of 3000 people, they gave to Columbus and his men.
When you talk in White circles about how the people of this continent were before foreign occupation, they always want to remind you that “things were not as Idyllic as we want to believe.” “Natives had slaves.” “Natives fought each other.”
Stop.
First. Stop turning a VAST continent into a MONOLITH.
Second. Name me a space in 1492 that didn’t have slavery.
Third. Name me a space before Colonization where tribes did not war. (There were around a dozen warring tribes of Britain before Boudica of the Iceni united them against the Romans)
Finally. Tell me how small intertribal battles and slavery that was nothing like the chattel slavery of the Africans by European Nations (we are a European Nation, founded as a nation by Europeans and their thought processes) equates the Genocidal land grab that happened. Comes with in a 10th of equating the Genocidal Land Grab that happened.
Civilization was not brought to the Turtle Islands.
Civilization was here, it was stolen.
Rape and Pillage of the Earth was brought to Turtle Islands.
Greed was brought to the Turtle Islands.
There are no exact numbers of how many people of the Taino tribes where here when Columbus landed. Numbers range from 2-3 thousand to 2-3 million and up. The numbers are hotly debated and of course never reported by the original. Stories say the numbers were higher. 2020 genetic analysis estimated a few tens of thousands. This to me states that there were a few tens of thousands whose genes made it to modern populations.
I have heard said that the population numbered around 5 million when he landed and by the time he left a few months later, it was around ten thousand.
White history states that he left and took people with him and then came back and started his butchery. White history talks about some of the cruelty, but doesn’t even speak of half of what was drawn by white contemporaries.
Wikipedia will tell you that hands were cut off, what it won’t tell you is the drawings of people being put on a spit, of babies hanging from trees.
The first meeting of Europeans with the Indigenous peoples here was a genocide on scales no movie or report from WWII will make you understand.
I can not see anything but that the land must have ran red with blood from those who were slaughtered in vicious ways meant to induce terror on the rest of the population in the extreme.
That the Sadism that must have ran rampant among the European Christian Men who tortured and murdered millions of people, in a hand full of months to the decade the most generous numbers give for this genocides timeline, must have made the screams and wails wash over the land 24/7.
This is your hero.
A known drunk.
A Known Failure.
The man who was the author of one of the Most Horrific genocides in history.
How is his statue not like putting Hitlers downtown?
Now I want you to know a little of who the Taino people were when Columbus landed on them.
They were matrilineal with male inheritance being standard. This is seen in several cultures pre colonization or Christian take over. They were very egalitarian and lived in close contact with the Earth. Practicing of Polygamy happened with both men and women, inheritance and leadership passed to both males and females. Many of our words today come from them in fact. They were a wide group with 29 documented chiefdoms, many chief's being women. Excellent trappers and hunters and fishers, excelling at tending in honorable harvest. Taino women lived in groups that contained their children and because of this had a deep control over their bodies and decisions. They participated at all levels of political hierarchy. Despite this the Spaniards took the Taino woman as an exchange item. This is all stuff you can learn from a simple google search.
You can’t learn the deeper part of them unless you talk to their descendants.
Today I bring you an excerpt of my work.
History the First.
I am writing to you from the lands of the Atfalati, Cowlitz, Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, and the Kalapuya peoples. I give acknowledgement that this land belongs to these tribes and is currently under occupation from a foreign government who has placed the peoples whose land it is into internment camps where they receive little access to arable land, enforcing starvation compounded by a lack of water access while it continues to steal their children.
I ask that it is acknowledged that this government is foreign, that through ignoring treaties, sovereignty, and basic rights including that to life, this government has continued a genocide that at its most generous description rivals the foreign Holocaust we speak of while ignoring the ongoing one on our shores.
I ask that you acknowledge the thriving peoples of these tribes that still exist with in this space, in beautiful resilience forced upon them, and open your heart to what is going on today when these peoples go with out water in the hottest summer in history.
Thank you for taking a moment to acknowledge that before you move on.
You might understand this as a space in what is currently known as Portland Oregon.
The first tool for your new understanding I am going to give you is a website where you can find out what peoples belonged to the land you currently occupy. This website, https://native-land.ca/ and shows all the currently known Indigenous peoples of the world and with a simple entering of where you live you can find out who’s land you exist on.
Why is this important?
Land Acknowledgement is important. Unless your ancestors lived here before 1492, you are occupying stolen land.
I don’t think I can express to you this concept and understanding enough. The vast majority of America belongs to a religion that teaches that Stealing and Murder are wrong. Those two things are against American laws and considered foundational. Yet, those two things are the foundation of this country.
We talk about slavery, not enough and not in depth enough, yet we very rarely to never talk about the people who lived here before 1492 and their grandchildren who you meet at the grocery store and tell to go back where they came from. (See ranting Karen in black and white stripes on youtube last year calling a Native Woman a Mexican and telling her to go back to where she came from… The reaction is quite satisfying.)
When we do have these conversations, we have this conversation as “They WERE”
The American government has worked so hard to erase the people Indigenous to Turtle Island to the point that during the election last year some states posted results from poles as; White people, Black people, Mexican people, and Something Else.
We live in current erasure of the peoples whose land America is currently continuing to steal, American's have decided that while Indigenous peoples to Turtle Island live, thrive, survive in the space America forced them into, they don’t exist.
So Americans can benefit.
I ask you to see this.
And then to look in your mirror and ask yourself if this is something you are ok with.
I want you to hold onto your answer for longer then 15 minutes.
In 1492 Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue.
A pneumonic poem to teach grade school kids that manifest destiny was a valid reason for genocide.
And I mean Genocide.
I need you to under stand that we are not even talking about genocide on a modern idea which is in fact quite tame.
Tame.
We are talking about roasting babies over the fire while their parents watched.
Flaying people alive.
Today the world sees when genocide happens, no one saw this. Except the Spanish and the Taino.
Today, one is forced by science to understand that there are humans standing on the other side.
The people who governed that in 1492 was the Church.
The church told the Spanish that the Taino were not human because they didn’t worship God.
Columbus named them “Los Ninos de la Endeo” meaning the Children of God, even being the children of God did not stop Columbus though.
He described the Taino as Children of God because they lived in a tended garden, recorded in his journals as what walking through Edan must have been like. They were kind and generous and welcoming. From their small villages to their Cities of 3000 people, they gave to Columbus and his men.
When you talk in White circles about how the people of this continent were before foreign occupation, they always want to remind you that “things were not as Idyllic as we want to believe.” “Natives had slaves.” “Natives fought each other.”
Stop.
First. Stop turning a VAST continent into a MONOLITH.
Second. Name me a space in 1492 that didn’t have slavery.
Third. Name me a space before Colonization where tribes did not war. (There were around a dozen warring tribes of Britain before Boudica of the Iceni united them against the Romans)
Finally. Tell me how small intertribal battles and slavery that was nothing like the chattel slavery of the Africans by European Nations (we are a European Nation, founded as a nation by Europeans and their thought processes) equates the Genocidal land grab that happened. Comes with in a 10th of equating the Genocidal Land Grab that happened.
Civilization was not brought to the Turtle Islands.
Civilization was here, it was stolen.
Rape and Pillage of the Earth was brought to Turtle Islands.
Greed was brought to the Turtle Islands.
There are no exact numbers of how many people of the Taino tribes where here when Columbus landed. Numbers range from 2-3 thousand to 2-3 million and up. The numbers are hotly debated and of course never reported by the original. Stories say the numbers were higher. 2020 genetic analysis estimated a few tens of thousands. This to me states that there were a few tens of thousands whose genes made it to modern populations.
I have heard said that the population numbered around 5 million when he landed and by the time he left a few months later, it was around ten thousand.
White history states that he left and took people with him and then came back and started his butchery. White history talks about some of the cruelty, but doesn’t even speak of half of what was drawn by white contemporaries.
Wikipedia will tell you that hands were cut off, what it won’t tell you is the drawings of people being put on a spit, of babies hanging from trees.
The first meeting of Europeans with the Indigenous peoples here was a genocide on scales no movie or report from WWII will make you understand.
I can not see anything but that the land must have ran red with blood from those who were slaughtered in vicious ways meant to induce terror on the rest of the population in the extreme.
That the Sadism that must have ran rampant among the European Christian Men who tortured and murdered millions of people, in a hand full of months to the decade the most generous numbers give for this genocides timeline, must have made the screams and wails wash over the land 24/7.
This is your hero.
A known drunk.
A Known Failure.
The man who was the author of one of the Most Horrific genocides in history.
How is his statue not like putting Hitlers downtown?
Now I want you to know a little of who the Taino people were when Columbus landed on them.
They were matrilineal with male inheritance being standard. This is seen in several cultures pre colonization or Christian take over. They were very egalitarian and lived in close contact with the Earth. Practicing of Polygamy happened with both men and women, inheritance and leadership passed to both males and females. Many of our words today come from them in fact. They were a wide group with 29 documented chiefdoms, many chief's being women. Excellent trappers and hunters and fishers, excelling at tending in honorable harvest. Taino women lived in groups that contained their children and because of this had a deep control over their bodies and decisions. They participated at all levels of political hierarchy. Despite this the Spaniards took the Taino woman as an exchange item. This is all stuff you can learn from a simple google search.
You can’t learn the deeper part of them unless you talk to their descendants.
Because there are descendants.
Despite the horrific genocide that happened to their people to the extent that some genetic research states there weren’t enough left to be a viable genetic population with out admixture, the Taino survived.
The Taino thrived.
Despite occupation, colonization, genocide.
I have a good friend who is Taino I was in Standing Rock with. I went to school with a Taino woman. Many people you meet who are from Cuba or surrounding areas are Taino.
The Taino share one of the very few things that all tribes of Turtle Island do have in common.
They are Resilience personified.
I thank you today for reading this, I know much of it was hard to read, as it was hard to write. I want to thank you for the courage it takes to examine things in ways you have not before. The courage it takes to realize that the history you know that maybe puts you in a great light, is not the reality of what happened. Changing one’s idea of who they are and where they came from is a very hard and painful task. I love that you are ready to hear.
I ask you to understand that Nothing I say can start to describe the amazing peoples the Taino were and are. I encourage you to look deeper into what my very brief accounts are. I encourage you to know the Taino around you. Not as an oddity, but as the vibrant part of who we are today that the Taino people still are.
To any Taino reading this. If I have stated things wrong, I ask of you to correct me. If I have given information, you’d wish not shared (I only used what is on Wikipedia as I felt it would not share more than is ok, yet that may not have been enough) please let me know.
I wish to do as much honor to this story as I can as a person who is not Taino.
Action outside words
Outside of my written works, I also work as a healer and story teller.
And I stand frontlines as a shield medic. Meaning I stand a shield wall and keep a trauma kit on me, as well as providing traditional medicines.
I also acknowledge and know there are many different ways we all contribute to this fight to see justice for our relations. Not only in others, but in myself for I contribute in many ways outside front lines.
I do not stand lines for notoriety. I do not take pictures of myself. I do not lift my voice above others while participating in Direct Action.
I stood in Iraq, because I was required to.
I stood in Standing Rock because I took an oath to defend my people against all enemies foreign or domestic and the enemy was domestic.
I stood in Portland because Matter is Minimum, the last time we saw the slow press torture technique was at the Salem Witch Trials (have an Aunt who died there) and I am tired of the devaluation of my black and brown family by the American government.
I stand because I am too exhausted to do otherwise.
Because I can not understand why we are still dealing with this.
Why Indigenous women my age I know have been force sterilized.
I stand so you will hear my cry.
Are you here for the Revolution?
Then you can fight to my left and right.
For it is time to rise against Racism with might.
We are not here for a minute,
There’s no 15 minutes in on it.
We are here because we demand you Stop.
Stop killing our Sisters
Robbing us of our Brothers
Stop Taking children from their mothers.
Your humanity lost when you negated theirs
On color of skin
Humanity is CARE of ALL, the sacred with in.
You claim “Patriotism” and “Rights”
But Racism is all you got from our forefathers fight.
That and the benefits of 500+ years of genocide.
You’re out hunting down others
Overpowered and Overarmed
Putting lives at risk from Main St to burning Farms.
All for self, cowards you are
Whingeing your “rights”, whining and nutters
While taking them from all others.
I’m done with you
And your paid for Police
Screaming my War Cry “NO JUSTICE NO PEACE”
Stop Killing Period
No one gave you the Right
Not even your bible you use in the fight.
He was 13, a scared autistic child
11 bullets cause he didn’t follow a weaklings cries.
Protect and serve Nothing But LIES.
She was Sleeping.
The HERO YOU WILL NEVER BE.
Your coward ass shot her in the Land of the Free.
500+ years of Racism and Genocide
Systemic, disease ridden, our country’s STD
Our obligation for a moral society?
Gone with the Wind
In a bunch of Nazi Cracker’s eyes
Karen on the street screaming racist Lies.
So unless you’re here for the fight
Unless you’re standing up for others Rights
Sit your ass up and shut your shit down.
Because we are long past accepting Small Changes
We are done with your Eugenics Insanity.
You Have Lost Your Humanity.
poem by Sara de Widda
Are you here for the Revolution?
Then you can fight to my left and right.
For it is time to rise against Racism with might.
We are not here for a minute,
There’s no 15 minutes in on it.
We are here because we demand you Stop.
Stop killing our Sisters
Robbing us of our Brothers
Stop Taking children from their mothers.
Your humanity lost when you negated theirs
On color of skin
Humanity is CARE of ALL, the sacred with in.
You claim “Patriotism” and “Rights”
But Racism is all you got from our forefathers fight.
That and the benefits of 500+ years of genocide.
You’re out hunting down others
Overpowered and Overarmed
Putting lives at risk from Main St to burning Farms.
All for self, cowards you are
Whingeing your “rights”, whining and nutters
While taking them from all others.
I’m done with you
And your paid for Police
Screaming my War Cry “NO JUSTICE NO PEACE”
Stop Killing Period
No one gave you the Right
Not even your bible you use in the fight.
He was 13, a scared autistic child
11 bullets cause he didn’t follow a weaklings cries.
Protect and serve Nothing But LIES.
She was Sleeping.
The HERO YOU WILL NEVER BE.
Your coward ass shot her in the Land of the Free.
500+ years of Racism and Genocide
Systemic, disease ridden, our country’s STD
Our obligation for a moral society?
Gone with the Wind
In a bunch of Nazi Cracker’s eyes
Karen on the street screaming racist Lies.
So unless you’re here for the fight
Unless you’re standing up for others Rights
Sit your ass up and shut your shit down.
Because we are long past accepting Small Changes
We are done with your Eugenics Insanity.
You Have Lost Your Humanity.
poem by Sara de Widda