Land, Labor & Liberation

This Work Exists on Stolen Land from Stolen Labor

We acknowledge that this work is created on the unceded territory of the Mohican and Munsee Lenape People: the original stewards of what is now known as Jersey City and Hoboken, New Jersey. Long before colonization, this land was a place of ceremony, trade, kinship, and memory. They were not “removed” peacefully. They were violently displaced, dispossessed, and targeted for erasure through settler-colonial policy and forced relocation. Yet the Mohican and Munsee Lenape People are still here. Their sovereignty is not a past tense.

We also acknowledge that this land (like much of what is called the United States) was built by the enslaved labor of African peoples, stolen from their homelands and forced to build the wealth of white settler society. That legacy did not end with abolition; it continues through policing, incarceration, economic exploitation, and systemic anti-Blackness.

Today, this region’s survival continues to depend on migrant labor—primarily Black, Brown, Indigenous, and undocumented workers who are underpaid, overpoliced, and rendered invisible while holding up our cities, homes, food systems, and digital infrastructure. From the fields to the tech pipelines, this land is still maintained through racial capitalism.

This acknowledgement is not just a ritual. It is a call to action. We commit to:

• Supporting land rematriation and Indigenous resurgence

• Working toward reparations and abolition of carceral systems

• Honoring and protecting migrant communities

• Uplifting decolonial organizing and mutual aid rooted in collective liberation

This statement will evolve as we learn. But the truth is simple:

We are settlers on stolen land, building in the afterlife of slavery, and sustained by the labor of people who deserve more than survival.

Queer Liberation Is Indigenous, Intersex, and Unfinished

We fly this flag not for visibility, but for reckoning.

This is not the Pride flag of corporations and rainbow capitalism. This is a banner of resistance—rooted in the bodies, identities, and ancestral knowledge systems that colonization tried to erase.

This version holds Black and Brown trans brilliance, intersex sovereignty, trans and nonbinary fluidity, and Two-Spirit cosmology—the fullness of queer existence across race, gender, and time. The addition of feathers speaks not only to Indigenous visibility, but to the sacred gender roles and ceremonial identities that were violently suppressed by Christian imperialism and settler assimilation. We do not ask to be seen—we demand to be honored.

We uplift the legacy of Latine and Black trans women like Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, the Two-Spirit warriors reclaiming ceremony, and the intersex activists defying surgical colonization. Queerness is not new. Transness is not Western. And gender liberation is not optional.

Learn More, Take Action:

• TJFP - A community-led funding initiative founded in 2012 to support grassroots, trans justice groups run by and for trans people in the United States, including U.S. territories.

• IC4E -Promoting human rights and equality for all intersex people through art, education and action.

• BAAITS– One of the most established 2S orgs in the U.S., hosting the largest Two-Spirit powwow annually.

The Pattern of Palestinian Resistance

We honor the keffiyeh as a testament to survival, land, and liberation. It was created in the SWANA area and passed from hand to hand, generation to generation. The keffiyeh holds the weight of Palestinian shepherds, revolutionaries, poets, and mothers. It is a living archive of a people whose existence has never been passive, it has always been resistance.

Unlike the modern Palestinian flag, the keffiyeh was never created by a state. It carries the land itself; woven by workers, worn by farmers, and carried into protest lines and refugee camps alike. It has been banned and criminalized by occupying forces, precisely because it is so powerful. It tells the story of a people who refuse to be erased. By uplifting the keffiyeh over the flag, we align ourselves with Palestinian indigeneity, not just nationality—with the soul of the struggle, not just its political boundary.

To wear it, post it, or display it with intention is to say: we see Palestine not as a conflict, but as a colonized homeland. We support land back, the right of return, and the abolition of apartheid. And we understand that Palestinian liberation is braided into the fate of all movements for decolonization—from Turtle Island to the Philippines, from Congo to Chiapas.

Learn more, take action:

• USCPR - A national coalition of hundreds of groups, founded in 2001, working to advocate for Palestinian rights.

• Decolonize Palestine – Accessible, radical education resource built by Palestinians to reclaim the narrative.

Access Is a Praxis of Liberation

We fly this updated Disability Pride Flag with intention and reverence. Its charcoal background holds the memory of lives lost to ableism, institutional violence, eugenics, and systemic neglect, and we do not look away from that grief. The five diagonal stripes, red, gold, white, blue, and green, cut across the flag like beams of resilience, each one representing a specific community: those with physical, neurodivergent, invisible, psychiatric, and sensory disabilities. This flag is intersectional by design, a refusal to flatten the complexity of disabled experience, the same refusal that moves through everything offered here.

Disability Justice, as envisioned by Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, and trans disabled leaders, teaches us that access is not a feature, it’s a practice of collective care, it is not compliance with ADA checklists. It is the radical reimagining of how we design, relate, and move through space and time. In this space, we reject pity, saviorism, and productivity culture. We align ourselves with the Disability Justice principles that center interdependence, body sovereignty, and liberation without assimilation.

We recognize that disabled people are not a burden to accommodate, they are the blueprint for a liberated future. From crip time to access intimacy, from AAC (augmentative communication) to collective rest, the disability community has gifted the world transformative ways of being. We honor those innovations. And we listen to those most excluded, not to include them in unjust systems, but to build new systems where all bodies and minds can belong, lead, and thrive.

Learn more, take action:

• Sins Invalid– Disability justice performance collective centering disabled queer people of color.

• Disability Visibility Project– Platform founded by Alice Wong, uplifting disabled voices and radical storytelling.

The Land Sings Our Name

This is more than a flag, it is a cosmic drumbeat. The Puerto Rico Libre flag featuring the Taíno Coquí speaks in a language older than colonization. The Coquí is not just an animal, it is a prayer, a spirit guide, and a living heartbeat of the land. Its sound is the voice of Borikén herself, calling her children to right relationship, memory, and sovereignty.

This version of the flag centers the Coquí as the protector of land, water, and ancestral rhythm. It reminds us that the fight for liberation is not only political, it is ecological, spiritual, and intimate, a living relationship we reclaim and realign with again and again rather than a battle fought once and finished. When the U.S. imposes debt, poisons water, and gentrifies the sacred, the Coquí still sings. When they rename our rivers and bulldoze our trees, the Coquí still sings. And we answer, because answering is how the relationship continues.

I honor this symbol not as decoration, but as ancestral inheritance. The Taíno people of Borikén are my ancestors. The land remembers us, and we remember the land, across generations in both directions, through ancestors, siblings, and descendants, human and more than human, seen and unseen. In flying this flag, I affirm my role in this intergenerational fight, for language, for land, for the restoration of Indigenous futures, and for the Living Balance that colonization has never fully severed and never will.

Learn more, take action:

• Colectivo Ilé – Anti-colonial organization rooted in racial and ancestral justice in Puerto Rico

• The United Confederation of Taíno People (UCTP) - a sovereign alliance of Taíno descendants working to restore Indigenous nationhood, cultural memory, and self-determination across the Caribbean and its diasporas.

We don’t discount offerings

Healing, rest, learning, and liberation should never be luxuries.

But in a world built on colonization, extraction, and profit-over-people, they are hoarded and priced like commodities.

What We Practice - Sliding Scale Pricing

We offer a multi-tiered pricing structure, with transparent tiers that reflect structural access, not “how much you like me.”

Tiers are named not by value, but by economic and racial reality:

Rooted – For those planting seeds while tending to their own needs.

You can make this investment, even if it’s a stretch. It may feel tender, but you know it’s worth it. You’re saying yes to yourself with courage.

Nourished – For those who have enough and choose to circulate care.

This rate feels steady and aligned. You can make this investment without financial strain. It’s a balanced, grounded commitment to your growth.

Abundant – For those with overflow who joyfully redistribute resources.

You have abundance to share. It brings you joy to give generously and help others access this work. Your investment supports equity, healing, and community care.

Solidarity Spots: Always available, no questions asked. Because you don’t need to explain your trauma or prove your worth to access care.

More than Accessibility — We Practice Liberation Design

• Payment plans with zero interest.

• Free affinity spaces for Black, Indigenous, and global majority folks.

• Low-bandwidth, screen-free options for neurodivergent and rural-accessible engagement.

• All-gender safe spaces, disability-respecting formats, and trauma-informed facilitation.

• Land, lineage, and labor acknowledgment because practices have histories, and we name and honor them rather than erase them.

Have a Barrier? Reach out.

You don’t need to disclose your trauma, explain your income, or perform your pain.

Just tell us what you need, and we’ll work together to get you in the room.

brenda@authenticwholeself.com

This is healing in the cracks of empire. This is ancestral technology. This is care as uprising.

And you? You’re already part of the revolution.

Practices That Remember Us

This liberation practice does not rise from a single place. It breathes across lineages that refused empire in a thousand forms.

Here we honor the ways liberation is remembered:

• In the woven cosmologies of Pacific Islander navigators who mapped justice through waves.

• In the silence of neurodivergent kin whose stimming, pausing, and pacing speak what cannot be said.

• In the kinship economies of Filipinx bayanihan that fed the hungry without hierarchy.

• In the rhythm-based healing of Black diasporic lineages that metabolized grief through movement.

• In the fragmented-but-sacred rituals of diasporic Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and animist-rooted peoples whose practices survived in secret.

• In the kitchens, the altars, the laundromats, the queer bedrooms, the back pews, the silence of survivors, the breath of those who cannot march but still remember.

I do not claim these lineages.
I move in relationship with them.
If you do not see yours named here, know this: absence is not erasure.
Some truths are too sacred to list.

This is a living section. A reciprocal breath.
You are invited to offer the names, practices, or memories that shape your liberation.