Status Updates From Asegi Stories: Cherokee Que...

“We must tell our stories, and reimagine our stories, in order to link arms together with others to carry us out of the colonial present and into a decolonized future. Our stories are waiting for us between the basket walls. Our stories reweave the world.”

“when we worked with [images of] flowers, we made the missionaries happy. but hidden in the flowers, as well as other images, the beliefs were kept alive. in the flowers were messages and telegrams… one bead color touching another meant something… the spiritual teachings still circulated”

“Or, perhaps more to the point, what do we choose not to remember? Why do we employ memory in the ways we do, in ways that only consider the absence of Two-Spirit and queer people rather than our presence? Or forget that the absence of Two-Spirit people in the colonial record shows not only our absence, but our presence?”

“the past is a set of possible worlds that cannot be changed and voices that cannot be restored, but we can certainly change our current perception of the past by constructing new images of how things might have been if they were not what missionaries and men of letter told us they were.”