drift

this did not begin in one place. it began between tiohtià:ke and kjipuktuk. between bodies, between losses, between structures that were not built for us and the ones we built anyway.

this project moves through lands that were never ceded. kanien’kehá:ka territory. mi’kma’ki. but these names do not make the occupation more bearable. naming is not repair. naming does not return the land. this acknowledgement is not a gesture of belonging. it is a recognition that i am here— moving, writing, surviving—inside someone else’s rupture.

i am not indigenous to these lands. but i am not white on them either. as a black diasporic person, my presence is shaped by displacement, extraction, and capture. i do not claim neutrality. i do not claim reconciliation. i claim relation, tension, accountability.

i walk through cities built by empire. some call them canada, scotland, portugal. i call them what they are: ruins pretending to be nations.

drift is not about rooting. it is about reading what cannot be stabilized. what gets erased. what comes back anyway.

this is not a land acknowledgement. this is a refusal to forget where i’m standing. and what that standing costs.