We Are Tomorrow’s Ancestors
Healing historical relationships with and within Black & Indigenous communities
through communion on mortality, ancestry, and affirming our lives.
We Are Tomorrow’s Ancestors believes Black and Indigenous healing is a portal to broader healing–your healing, systemic healing, the Earth’s healing. Through our ancestry, we all have inherited deep, intimate relationships to Black & Indigenous life and death. We believe in acknowledging and bringing those relationships to the forefront of personal practice and activism.
This work is fractal, and by focusing on healing with and within the most historically marginalized and systemically oppressed communities, it inevitably begets healing with and within all other communities. Through this lens, we commit to the work of healing with and within Black and Indigenous communities, in direct alignment with anti-racist, abolitionist, and futurist visions.
THE PORTAL
Leave behind the world governed by supremacy and punition, driven by extraction and isolation as currency, and fueled by cyclical systemic oppression.
Step into a portal of radical, revolutionary reconception of community and justice:
A pluriverse governed by restoration, driven by generosity and community as currency, and fueled by symbiotic healing that meets all needs.
Nina Grae: Video production, editing, and original music composition
Sophia Aguiñaga: Spoken word, poetry, and prompts
WHAT DID YOU INHERIT FROM YOUR ANCESTORS AND WHAT WILL YOU LEAVE BEHIND?
We all have work to do, and that work differs drastically depending upon your relationship to anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism. This is where you choose your own journey and, much like in real life, your identity construct will inform the path you take. Whichever path is yours, trust that you are entering a portal to a radical, revolutionary reconception of community and justice – and it is lit in here.
These questions drive our healing work: What relationships to anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism did you inherit? How do they shape your way of perceiving and being in the world? What work must we do to forge reparative, healing relationships that will engender new relationships for future generations?
BLACK & INDIGENOUS RELATIVES
As Black and Indigenous people alive in 2020, we were born living protests. Our very existence is a protest against imperialist white patriarchal capitalism. Every bit of decolonization we achieve in ourselves and our world makes that protest stronger and more vibrant. Our existence and the practice of decolonization are an honoring of our ancestors and an acknowledgment that all of us here today are tomorrow’s ancestors.
In many Westernized cultures, death is perceived as morbid and spooky. The process is often individualized, medicalized, and marginalized. Yet, for Black and Indigenous people, many of our ancestors held and hold philosophies around death and mortality that celebrate the interconnectedness of life and death as a rebirth, and many engage(d) in public grieving and celebration ceremonies.
Drawing on those roots, I invite you to an ongoing series of virtual protests that ask us to turn inward and turn toward each other in care, grief, celebration, affirmation, and honor of our past and future ancestry.
We can’t talk about Black and Indigenous death and mortality fully and honestly without examining the people who and systems that have made our detriment the cornerstone of their thriving. Our narratives of mortality and ancestry have been inalterably shaped by systems that value us more dead or dying than alive.
That’s why all events, unless otherwise stated, are for Black and Indigenous attendees only and are free of charge, made possible by the WATA Fund, a reparations fund. We believe Black and Indigenous people are owed healing, we are owed safety, we are owed rest and sacred communion.
Join us in healing communion.
NB/NI POC & WHITE RELATIVES
If you’ve landed on this page, you’re likely already aware of the global uprising against anti-Black racism and have been exploring what you can do during this time of unveiling. What does it mean to “do the work”? Where does your healing lie?
We invite you to join us in bringing your ancestral relationships to Black and Indigenous communities to the forefront of your personal practices and activism. We’ve developed a symbiotic organizational model in which Black and Indigenous healing is also your healing.
We do this through The WATA Fund, a community practice of Reparations and non-optical allyship for NB/NI POC and white people. We redistribute resources to the Black and Indigenous community through ensuring the event series remains free for attendees and through direct giving to organizations that center Black and Indigenous lives.
A practice of Reparations is also a practice of relational and karmic healing. By forging radical, revolutionary ways of relating to each other, we begin to heal the discord sewn by ancestral lineages that have historically been in the position of an oppressor, and by ancestral lineages that have historically benefitted from anti-Black and anti-Indigenous oppression.
As tomorrow’s ancestors, it is our work to own, and the work is as much material as it is spiritual. It serves to heal Black and Indigenous people and, simultaneously, every facet of civilization that has been impacted by imperialist, white, patriarchal capitalism – including you.
Join us in healing communion.
IMPORTANT NOTE
At every opportunity, these events will feature Black and Indigenous representation—from the attendees to our featured artists and educators to the behind-the-scenes support. WATA is a safe, sacred space for Black and Indigenous communion and generation of paid opportunities for our communities.
THE ORIGIN OF WATA
We Are Tomorrow's Ancestors (WATA), led by Sophia Aguiñaga, is the newest branch of the nonprofit organization You’re Going to Die (YG2D). YG2D’s mission is to explore humanity’s shared mortal experience—to grieve, bereave & honor what we’ve lost & loved while making room for being alive where we are with what we have.
REMINDER
WATA events are explicitly committed to serving those who identify as Black and Indigenous. If you aren’t part of these communities, find out how you can partner with WATA. For a kindred event, please check out the original You’re Going to Die series!