Inaugural Event
Featuring: adrienne maree brown and James Jones
Co-hosted by Sophia Aguiñaga and Angela Hennessy
REMINDER: This event is explicitly committed to serving those who identify as Black and Indigenous and is free for attendees.
If you aren’t part of these communities but are interested in a kindred event, please check out the original You’re Going to Die series!)
ABOUT:
Welcome. I’m Sophia, a Black and Mexican woman who’s, maybe like you, been feeling the immensity of this collective moment. Systemic racism and COVID-19 are converging to threaten our communities. The recent uprisings have acknowledged and validated our fights, yet they have also magnified the brutality of our realities.
A dedicated communion focused on the experience of Black and Indigenous mortality, honoring our ancestry, and affirming our lives through sharing, celebration, and communion is overdue. Especially when our histories of relentless perseverance in the face of colonization, lost languages, lost land and broken treaties, genocide, slavery, police brutality, suicide, and disease are gaining worldwide acknowledgment and validation for the first time in history. To meet this critical moment, a brilliant team of creators and I are leading the launch of a new, ongoing series.
We Are Tomorrow’s Ancestors (WATA) is an ongoing series of performances, talks, and open mic sessions that hold space for Black and Indigenous people to:
Explore, share about, and bring visibility to our relationships with our individual and collective mortality and intersectional lives and all its surrounding thoughts, interpretations, and emotions in a safe, closed space;
Explore, define, and claim what it means, today, for us to be or become ancestors;
Transmute grief and our unique histories with mortality into healing, power, creativity, community, and affirmation of our lives; and
Rest into and build upon the history of solidarity that the Black and Indigenous communities share as freedom fighters and the most direct targets of imperialist white patriarchal capitalism.