Weekly drop
In this week’s piece, Suzanne Dhaliwal shares her experience of movement work, reflecting on memory and the futures we begin before we can name them.
Image credit: Suzanne Dhaliwal
The movements we see today come from a lineage. A lineage of actions taken to create ancestral futures.
Lately I’ve been thinking about the futures in draft. The ones we begin without knowing what they’ll become. The last few weeks Mercury was in retrograde. It got me poring over old photographs. And thinking about the advice I would send myself then, knowing what I know now.
It’s 2008. You’ve left your job with Médecins Sans Frontières, sold all of your belongings, your records and your prized books and followed a dream and premonition you had about peak oil. You’ve decided, in the face of peak oil and the looming climate crisis, that the best thing to do is move back to England from Canada and live at Tinkers Bubble, a small off-grid woodland community in Somerset.
At the time, Canada feels deeply in denial about the connections between extractivism, Indigenous rights and the climate crisis (to some point it still is). You don’t have all the language for what you can see yet. But the Indigenous organising communities you encounter will start to change how you understand these intuitive connections: that climate justice cannot be separated from land, sovereignty, colonialism and the people defending their territories. This is something your art has been showing you too.
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