The Long Scrawl

01/31/2026

It’s far past time to skip over the hand wringing and acknowledge the ugly truth. This system is not worth saving.

Chiara Do’wal Sehi Enriquez, indigenous resistance artist, educator, and language keeper of the Karankawa Hawk Clan, said it like this: “I don’t want your apologies. I don’t want your accountability for what your ancestors did. I want you to engage in critical thinking. …The systems that your ancestors set up in place are still inherently violent, and because you still participate in them, because you still uphold them and claim them, and aren’t doing any work to either undo or ‘reform’ or dismantle them, you bear responsibility.”

My critical thinking led me to leave the USA. I don’t plan on ever returning. But removing my body from America doesn’t mean I am absolved of responsibility. And this is where I am often struggling.

I am not interested in putting any energy into “saving” America. It is not the land of free, not the home of the brave, not one nation under God, it is a settler colonial state rigged up on a scaffolding of bones. Perpetrator of genocides: multiple. The murder and displacement of indigenous people to facilitate theft of their land. The murder and displacement of black people to facilitate the building of these United States. The murder and displacement of countless peoples for countless years in a bald-faced bid for resources papered over with platitudes about “freedom” and “democracy.” The violence of these acts reverberates through us all. The injustice is active and ongoing.

“I do not want to be a settler, but I am one,” writes my friend Fariha Róisín. “So what does this mean? What does true accountability look like, for me?”

Fariha writes of Australia, the country they grew up in. Another land hijacked by the greed of an empire. Though Fariha also removed themselves bodily from that land, the settler identity is not one that can be so easily shrugged away. For them, the reckoning with accountability involves Land Back and mutual aid and decolonization of the mind and learning how to be with the land. It means breaking the cycle of trauma and envisioning and building new futures that hold every people.

“This is the world I’m working towards,” Fariha writes. “This means, primarily, I must start applying this work to myself.”

I, too, am applying this work to myself. I don’t always get it right. I have learned (and unlearned) so much, but I have so much further to go.

I always will be an American, no matter what land I call home. I have family there, of blood and of choice. People I love. People I will not abandon. And it will always be my job to dismantle the systems of harm that my ancestors built, actively with foreknowledge and blindly with passive participation.

What does accountability and activation look like for me, from Portugal? In part, it looks like the words I have put on this page. It looks like speaking up. It looks like supporting activists and organizers and mutual aid organizations in communities that I care about. It looks like educating myself. It looks like never getting comfortable. It looks like not looking away. It looks like not giving up even when all hope is lost.

(Hope, too, is a privilege. Look at indigenous people the world over— the Lakota, the Mayas, the Inuit, the Saami, the Aborigines, the Maori, the Palestinians, who have lost everything and everyone but never, ever lose sight of who they are. Never, ever stop fighting for justice for their people. )

I left my country, in part, because it was never really mine. Portugal isn’t really mine, either. But here is where I am now.