We have ancestral shame to heal. We have disabled lineages to honor. Let’s get to it. - Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
" "We have ancestral shame to heal. We have disabled lineages to honor. Let’s get to it.
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About Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (born April 21, 1975 in Worcester, Massachusetts) is a Toronto and Oakland-based poet, writer, educator and social activist.
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Additional quotes by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Most sick and disabled people I know approach healing wanting specific things—less pain, less anxiety, more flexibility—but not usually to become able-bodied. And many of us don’t feel automatically comfortable going to healing spaces at all because of our histories of being seen as freaks, scrutinized, infantilized, patronized with “What happened?” prayed over, and asked, “Have you tried acupuncture?” and a million other “miracle cures.”
The problem of surviving climate change as disabled people is not an individual problem, and because of this, there is no individual solution that will be enough to save us. Life as the only crip who survives may not be worth living.
In the immortal words of Sins Invalid, as disabled people, we are committed to a politic and practice of "we move together, with no one left behind." When I read those words for the first time, and since, I know that they are not a simple description of reality. There are plenty of us who have been abandoned to die, who have been left behind. But we know that as disabled people, we are some of the only ones of us who slow down and move at the pace of the slowest of us, call the nursing home over and over demanding to know if someone is OK, sit in the hospital ward letting the staff know people care about our friend who is sick. That phrase / those words, are an assertion and a challenge, to disabled and abled people alike. What strategies come to us at the slow back end of the march? The place where we leave no one to die?
As disability justice folks, we're gonna figure out the answers to surviving climate change together, with all the disabled ingenuity and creativity we've shown for our whole entire lives. We already are. We will not leave our people behind, and not slowly die with our disabled roots ripped out in strange soil.
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