Liberation is not a solitary event, but a living ecosystem—a deep, cultural, and political terrain from which an unyielding will to be free takes root. We write as a Palestinian and Indigenous couple, navigating this shared ground. Our aim is not to equate our distinct struggles, but to trace the parallel roots of our resistance and to sow the seeds of a collective vision for liberation.

We may imagine the Earth as a wounded body, yet there are those who, from within those very wounds, sow hope. As Frantz Fanon wrote, “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” This generation—the peoples of the Global South who resist—has chosen to fulfill it. At the heart of Abya Yala, as in the streets of Gaza, beats a single root: the land that calls to us, the memory that unites us, the dignity that refuses to surrender. Liberation is not an act of hatred, but a gesture of radical love toward life itself. This love manifests in the defense of water, in the care of seeds, in the revival of languages and ancestral knowledge that colonialism sought to erase.

Indigenous peoples, understood also as those who resist occupation and colonial dispossession, embody a global struggle. The root that sustains us is not “folkloric”; it is the stubborn intimacy that binds us to the world. They strip us of our culture and spirituality to parade them as symbols of “peace,” yet when we reclaim our spirituality to seek justice, we are criminalized, as the Palestinian struggle has been for decades. Palestine is not merely an occupied territory: it is the living symbol of Indigenous resistance to modern imperialism. The Palestinian struggle—like that of the Mapuche, the Nasa, or the peoples of the Amazon defends the right to exist in coherence with the needs of one’s land. 

Palestine understands that the land is not property, but a relationship. Colonialism does not settle for dominating bodies; it seeks to uproot them. And without roots, there is no future.

THE GLOBAL SUMUD FLOTILLA

Our identity is a river that flows, not a flag. That is why, when we sailed to Gaza, we carried a message: the Global South is silent no more. From Abya Yala to Palestine, from the Andes to the Mediterranean, the forgotten peoples have raised their voices. The Flotilla reminded us that the sea, once a route of colonial plunder, can also be a path to freedom. There, the struggles for land, water, and life converged. There, the word sumud, perseverance, became universal.

We, “the Activists”

Colonialism does not end with independence; reconciliation without restitution is only another form of domination. We do not seek inclusion in the State; we seek another way of being. For centuries, activism has been a space of white privilege. Climate conferences are held in luxury hotels while entire communities disappear under fire or drought. This imbalance reproduces colonial dynamics: the white “helper,” the Southern “victim,” the expert who dictates.

Yet movements like sumud and South–South cooperation are shifting the center of gravity: the South now represents itself, claims protagonism, and builds its own narratives. From the Global South, new voices rise to demand representation and action. We are the living manifesto of the people of the South, who do not need to be “saved,” but to be heard. To reclaim these global spaces is to recover the narrative, to break the monopoly of environmental discourse, and to place life, not capital, at the center of all decisions.

A Shared Story

As long as there is even a single Palestinian refugee, our struggle is not over. We are part of a vast network: Indigenous peoples reclaiming sovereignty, linked to communities that, from diaspora, exile, or refuge, also weave resistance and liberating imagination. The struggles of the Indigenous peoples of Abya Yala and those of Palestinian refugees are threads of the same fabric: the fight against an imperial project that binds together land, bodies, capital,

extraction, and racism. It is a shared story, between Abya Yala and Palestine, between my Muysca territory and my Palestinian husband’s homeland. 

Together, we work to reclaim sovereignty for the South. Our community work connects territories; we understand that liberation is not an isolated process but a planetary minga, a collective labor of the Earth. We resist mining, extractivism, and the desecration of sacred lands together. We are subjects of history, carriers of alliances, heirs to memories of resistance. “Our struggle is not to gain power, but to ensure that no one is ever humiliated again.”

From Palestine

My earliest memory of collective resilience dates back to the Second Intifada, when my father brought home posters from a homeland I longed for but was denied, a reality for millions. In those lost decades, oppression unfolded without witnesses, without cameras to capture the truth. 

As a child, I witnessed a nation refusing to die. I saw sumud: our refugee community protesting, facing repression, donating all we could to those inside the occupied lands. This continuity laid the foundation for the solidarity we see today. Yet it was the steadfastness of our people in Gaza that deepened my belief in sumud. They showed a resilience rooted in immense, collective love, 

standing against genocide, upholding resistance. This is the legacy of our olive trees, their stubborn roots testifying to a timeless bond with the land.

This is the fertile ground Ghassan Kanafani described. Our resistance was never mere reaction; it is a culture of preservation: the stitches of a Palestinian thobe mapping our villages, the defiant stomp of dabke at a wedding under siege, the verses of Darwish breathing our air, the art that splashes our colors on global walls, the taste of maqluba shared in a bombed-out kitchen. This is not a separate struggle; this is the struggle. Our artists, poets, cooks, and farmers are all resistance fighters tending the soil of our identity.

Our fight is often misunderstood. Some allies see our resistance as hatred, but for Palestinians it is the opposite: it is an act born of unbreakable love—for our land, our community, our future. We fight for something: for home, for the right to taste our ancestral olives, to return to a home we have never seen and have never forgotten. This love fuels our vision. We do not dream of a future built upon ashes, but one grown from reclaimed soil. In a liberated Palestine, the colonial entity will become a relic of the past, not because it was destroyed in hatred, but because it was transcended. It will have no place in a land so profoundly loved.

Our resistance, from the embroiderer’s needle to the poet’s pen to the fighter on the front lines, is the active weeding of our land, not to leave it barren, but to prepare the ground where our culture, our justice, and our life can bloom.