Jen Deerinwater, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and founding executive director of Crushing Colonialism, comments:

As I discuss in my piece, Sovereignty Lost included in the free ebook We Organize to Change Everything: Fighting for Abortion Access and Reproductive Justice by Verso Books and Lux Magazine, our rights to reproductive justice have been denied in multiple ways. From our children being stolen from us to the sterilization of our relatives, we have been denied our sovereign rights as Native people and nations. Unfortunately, when Native people speak up, particularly those of us who are multiply-marginalized, we are often hit with hate and violence as I’ve recently experienced in just the last 24 hours. 

As a Two-Spirit womxn who has had an abortion I chose to use gender neutral and expansive language throughout my writing. For this I was attacked by cis colonizers from Europe (Yes, they are actually in Europe) who felt they had the right to speak over me, to tell me how I should identify, and to insult me and our people with racist, ableist, and anti-queer slurs. I won’t be silenced. 

This rhetoric and control of the media and narrative is precisely why I began Crushing Colonialism. We as Indigenous people are the only ones who can speak on our experiences and as those experiences are vast so should the coverage of our relatives and issues. Crushing Colonialism exists to support our relatives in their work as multi-media content creators and storytellers. 

I founded this organization without any initial seed money. We’ve survived for five years primarily off of sheer determination and tenacity. To the dismay of colonizers though, we’re building deep roots to grow as a community and movement. We need your help though to make this happen. Please donate what you can, and follow us on all social media platforms, so that we can continue to uplift the voices of all our relatives.