Back in February, I told you that my family and I were moving to Lakota territory to engage in food autonomy and build something rooted in sovereignty. We believed we’d find a space where we could work without the immediate interference of settler systems, where our time wouldn’t be consumed by reacting to settler expectations of our existence.
I was wrong.
Instead, we found ourselves confronting colonization’s worst scars, not just in the actions of settlers, but in how deeply those scars have been carved into my kin. The family we went to collaborate with had turned the language of sovereignty into a smokescreen for harm. Behind their rhetoric was an armed gang engaged in drug trade, sex trafficking, and child sexual assault. We tried to confront this, to protect the kids who were being harmed, and that’s what made us targets.
It wasn’t just my kin who came after us. Settlers who had been drawn to this gang’s performative decolonial rhetoric—leftists, professional organizers, and self-appointed allies—chose to believe what suited their sense of solidarity, ignoring the violence they were enabling. Their intervention wasn’t just misguided; it reinforced the harms of colonization. These were settlers doing missionary work, whether or not they called it that.
(Read this post on my Substack, if you'd like:
Looking for Homes, Old and New
Letters from emsenn, an independent theorist using Lakota philosophy to study the world around them.
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When we sought refuge, it was with an elder whose intentions to protect us were undermined by their own reliance on colonized notions of solidarity. A couple professional activists who came to visit the elder revealed our location to those targeting us. Once more, we were forced to flee. Leaving the reservation, leaving my kin, was the only way to keep my immediate family safe.
Now, my family and I are in the Great Lakes region, trying to rebuild. It’s exhausting, but not defeating. Through all of this, one truth has emerged: I need to return to the virtual spaces where we’ve built connections, because those spaces have proven themselves as meaningful and uniquely capable of helping me unearth the truths I need to continue this work.
Virtual spaces are not free from settler dynamics. They are settler by default, embedded in the same systems of control and coercion that dominate the physical world. Yet, they also offer something unique. They allow for questioning, for stepping back and experimenting with relationships and ideas in ways that the physical world, in its immediacy, often stifles.
These spaces let me connect with people who share orientations toward liberation but occupy different positions in life, broadening the possibilities for solidarity. They let me write my truths fully, without being interrupted or dismissed mid-sentence, and without being reduced to “just another Native griping.” They allow for asynchronous engagement, which gives people the time to reflect instead of reacting defensively, trapped by ego or fear.
For someone like me, who is physically disabled, virtual spaces also remove barriers to participation that physical spaces often reinforce. They provide a buffer, a space where I can engage deliberately and build relationships thoughtfully. And maybe most importantly, they offer a sense of permanence. Even as I’ve been uprooted again and again, the connections and work I’ve done here remain.
They remind me of the story of Iktomi and the ducks.
Of ducks and illusions
Letters from emsenn, an independent theorist using Lakota philosophy to study the world around them.
In that story, illusion—a song, a distraction—traps its listeners in cycles of harm. The ducks, blinded by Iktomi’s tune, danced into captivity and death. Virtual spaces, for all their faults, give us a chance to step away from places Iktomi has trapped us. They make the song of illusion visible, offering a rare opening to question its rhythms and imagine new ways of being.
Virtual spaces don’t absolve us of settler dynamics, but they create room to navigate them differently. They allow me to experiment, to reflect, and to connect in ways that help me uncover truths I might otherwise miss. They don’t replace sovereignty or rooted, real-world relationships, but they provide a foundation—a space where I can see the patterns of control more clearly and, in doing so, imagine how to move beyond them.
And so, I return to these spaces not just as a refuge from harm, but as a tool for confronting it—an opening to seek and share the truths that have always been there, waiting, beyond the song.
