March 22, 2019
On March 9, Indigenous Honeys, which is a collective I co-founded, facilitated a zine-making workshop at Barnard College in New York City. We were invited by Quechua@NYU, which is an indigenous language study program at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. We were asked to share our experiences as Indigenous women zinesters. (Zines are noncommercial and, many times, homemade publications devoted to specialized and often unconventional subject matter.)
Our workshop, "Coming Home through Zine-Making: An Indigenous Feminist Praxis," sought to illuminate how positionality enables us to reflect and understand our responsibilities not only to each other, but the land, and our plant and animal relatives.
Our participants completed a half-sheet zine page, which highlighted their conceptualizations of home. We created a collective zine and ate delicious empanadas! After our workshop, we had the opportunity to visit Barnard's Zine Library.
On March 10, Quechua@NYU also invited us to vend at Warmipura, an event that featured art and music by "Indigenous/Latinx/Afro-identified womxn of Abya Yala." (Abya Yala refers to the American continents in the Guna language, meaning "Land Full of Life.") We shared our zines with many folks and were able to enjoy live music and storytelling.
This weekend trip allowed Indigenous Honeys to be visible beyond California, and it gave me the opportunity to interact with Native students at various academic institutions in New York.
