When the island sunk and the city folk fled, it was the weavers who saved us all.
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the waters swallowed our shores, they whispered, sa simula, sa simula, your end is soon coming,
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that is our island, but is also the adjoining islands that might as well be any and all islands because we are plentiful and many and scattered; and all of us, absolutely all of us, are already—
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; see: sinkage; sea rise; vulnerable coastline communities; disappearing island nations; heightening frequencies in extreme weather conditions such as: hurricanes, tsunamis, sea storms, and sea spells; high risk communes fending for themselves; entire cultures, homes, and histories drowning; the colonial legacy of stripping oceanic terrains of resources essential to sustain all connected life. There are community leaders asking for global support that are met with silence, silence, silence,
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long-lost their memories, their ancestral connectivities tethering their bellies to their stories to their sands; blinded by foreign corruption and destruction, they assimilated and adapted, molded by malevolent white hands. To put it simply, they had no reason left to stay, so they
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, yes, fled, ran swam tripped flew, turned their backs and abandoned their lands. They scurried like cowards, shrugged sayang na sayang absolving their bodies of guilt: decimation of resources is the american way — so, talaga, none of this is “their fault”—
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that never disappeared despite being silenced: Illocano, Bontoc, Aklanon, Yakan, B’laan, Kiniray-a, Hiligaynon, Mangyan, Mandaya, Maranao, Tausug, Kalinga, Kankana-ey, Ibaloi, Ilongot, Tinguian, Bukidnon, Higaonon, Mamanwa, Mansaka, Sangir, Subanen, Manobo, Bagobo, Tagabawa, Tagakaulo, Tasaday, Badjao, Ati, Tumandok, Batak, Palawano, Tagbanwa, T’boli, and Aeta, and more and more and more because being few does not mean less, so say their names, for the indigenous have never succumbed. They are here as they always have been, stewarding the lands and tending the shores,
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— when the globally powerful abandoned us, made the choice to stay — understand, these weavers
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the mundo, which can be envisioned like this: a practice of multiplicities; an honoring of divergent identities; new communities birthing upon half-sunken atolls and floating communes fractal and ancestral, connecting to ocean to land to beings to each other by our expansive shared waters; reharmonization in progress, stripping off traumas left by imperialism, engendering gunita until we return, deep return, in understanding to what it means to live an island’s way. And then, in sa katapusan, which is our soon beginning, the weavers taught us kapwa by singing
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Can you imagine it? Truly, can you dream it? Hear it, taste it, smell it? It could be a future, any future, perhaps our future, in which someone, anyone, everyone, cared enough to love us all.
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Noelle Marie Falcis is a scholar-artist with Visayan roots and migrant parents, settled upon unceded Tongva land. Most interested in visionary re-memory and re-imagination of histories and therefore futures, she pursues embodied storywork through writing and movement. Her fiction holds mythologic and folkloric elements of her heritage and tends to be grounded in the waters. She is working on a pair of novels. Follow her at www.nmfalcis.com.