“Art Saved my Life”: Revitalizing Affilia's Poetry and Creative Works in a Time of Socio-Political Transition

In late December, I had the profound honor of attending the inaugural Federal Boarding School Healing Summit at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This summit built upon the historic work initiated in 2021 by the Department of the Interior to investigate the United States federal Indian boarding school system, which included two comprehensive investigative reports (Newland, 2022; Newland, 2024). The Tribal Health Research Office at NIH and the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition launched this healing summit to develop initiatives aimed at addressing the intergenerational harms perpetuated by the Indian Civilization Act and Boarding School policies on American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian (AI/AN/NH) communities (NIH Tribal Health Research Office, 2024).

The summit brought together boarding school survivors, community practitioners, and scientific leaders in intergenerational trauma research and intervention development. It was a powerful, painful, and transformative event for me, and I imagine for many who attended or watched online. One consistent thread through the presentations and structured activities was the crucial healing role of storytelling and the power of truth-telling. A panel was organized to highlight stories from elder survivors. An elder on the panel, Lakota Harden (Minnecoujou/Yankton Lakota and Hochunk), poignantly stated, “You can’t have healing if you don’t hear the story.” As a multiracial Chicana and Indigenous scholar who focuses on diverse forms of storytelling in my research, this was a reminder of the importance of telling these historically obscured and purposefully erased narratives. It also emphasized the need to create spaces for these stories to be told to audiences who will listen, bear witness, and commit to action for social change. Elder Lakota continued, saying that we must tell the stories “but in a safe place, with relatives who hold you when you fall apart and build you back whole.”

During the same survivor panel, I was struck by another elder, Dora Brought Plenty (Lakota of Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Turtle Clan, Canadian Assinaboine, Alabama Coushatta, and Black) who said, “art saved my life” as she described the brutality of her boarding school experience. I was fortunate to co-facilitate a workshop with her on the role of art in healing. In that workshop and in conversation with me, she explained that art had literally saved her life because her skill in it distracted the teachers from the typical physical and emotional abuses and humiliations she experienced in other subjects. Art also became a place to escape; another world she could create, where there was love, color, purpose, and safety.

Art is the language of the heart (Pelias, 2004). Art through poetry and creative expression is a signal to others. It is proof that we are not alone as our narratives meet and join others with similar experiences (Beltrán, Alvarez & Fernandez, 2023; Leavy, 2014). It is documentation of resistance and the persistence of humanity to build toward a reimagined future. It is a counter-narrative; the leading edge of theory. Artists, creators, and social movements have always used their creative forms to convey deeper, more nuanced truths, to organize, to inspire, and to soothe the wounds of the collective. In relation to research, arts-based scholarship and texts are what Ronald Pelias calls “methodological calls, writings that mark a different space. They collect in the body; an ache, a fist, a soup” (Pelias, 2004, p. 11). This has been described as aesthetic knowing, a research approach that uses art “to disrupt the ordinary, which in turn stimulates change, transformation, and even transcendence” (Leavy, 2014, p. 20). In respect to aesthetics, the “beauty” of arts in research is connected to the development of empathy and self-reflexivity in both audience and scholar. There is beauty and rigor in using reflexivity to develop the capacity to critically interrogate one's positional identities, to reflect on the impact of those identities, and respond by building out openness in our hearts and minds toward social change (Beltrán, 2019; Leavy, 2014). In their contestation of objective knowledge, Women of Color scholars (and scholar-artists) (e.g., Anzaldúa, 1987; Madison, 1993; Moraga, 2020) have a long history of leading excavations of truth through creative forms, including poetry and poetic analytics (Beltrán, 2019). Beyond scholarship and contesting positivism, Women of Color have also described poetry as a necessary tool for existence, a way to name and claim experiences often rendered invisible or illegitimate, and to imagine toward something new and beautiful (Lorde, 1977; 1984; Witt, 2017).

Affilia has a history of uplifting creative and alternative ways of knowing through the diverse research that we publish, as well as poetry, with the incomparable Audre Lorde as Affilia's first poetry editor (Coss, 1995). Her scholarship, activism, and poetry are foundational to generations of critical feminists and artists. As Coss (2010) included in her editorial reviewing Affilia's history of publishing poetry, I am moved to remind us of the continued relevance of Audre Lorde's iconic assertion:

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives (Audre Lorde, 1984, p. 37 as cited in Coss, 2010).

While these are shoes I could never aim to fill, I am deeply humbled to follow in the footsteps of such a brave and bold intellectual ancestor. As the new Poetry and Creative Works editor, I am announcing that Affilia is rebooting this focus in our journal. In this genesis, however, we are expanding beyond poetry to invite diverse forms of creative works, including poetry, prose, short fiction, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, memoir, collage, and visual art. We will also invite submissions from youth and aspiring critical feminists through the “cultivating a feminist voice” subsection. Submission guidelines can be found on Affilia's website. I am joined in this revitalization by accomplished feminist social work scholars Antonia R.G. Alvarez, Lindsay Gezinski, Gita Mehrotra, and Mery Diaz as poetry and creative works editorial committee members.

While we could not have predicted that the timing of this revitalization project would coincide with our current socio-political turn, it is certain that critical feminism will continue to be a necessary intellectual home and site of resistance. In a 2017 interview, poet and author, Ijeoma Umebinyuou reinforced this idea; “I am a feminist. I am a womanist, I am aware of what happens when race and gender are erased and it is important none of that is done to me. For a woman to write, to speak, to narrate and to curate stories like I do, being a feminist isn’t an option; it is a necessity” (Umebinyuou as quoted in Witt, 2017). It is also important to remember, as my elders have said to me, this is not the first time we have been here. Indeed, Affilia, among others, has been in the crosshairs of coordinated efforts to discredit and delegitimize academic journals that publish critical, feminist, post-colonial, creative, and non-mainstream ways of knowing in the recent past (Park et al., 2019). With the most recent wave of anti-feminist, anti-critical race theory, and rollbacks of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in higher education and corporate America, we can anticipate that similar attacks on our approach to leveraging critical feminisms in many forms may emerge. We must remain committed to illuminating the purposely marginalized stories, voices, and forms toward reshaping a society for liberation and social justice across identities, experiences, and ideas. As we prepare to navigate another federal administration that has directly taken aim at truth-telling and vows to uphold white supremacy and the historical and persistent mythology of American exceptionalism, the survivor elders’ words hold profound implications. They remind us that it is essential to create spaces for intentionally hidden truths to be told in ways that are meaningful to impacted communities and transcendent of typical mainstream or academic forms.

Throughout the two-and-a-half-day healing summit, I was inspired by many presentations. I took notes of statements I heard and descriptions of experiences, sensations, and emotions expressed while bearing witness. There was something complex yet cathartic about being in and claiming space on a government campus, a place from which many of us, our bodies, and our collective histories had been previously excluded. Yet now we were invited and hosted with generosity and care. There was something hopeful, and optimistic, despite and maybe because of the painful stories. There was also an unspoken but felt sense of grief over all that had been accomplished in recent years, which is in a precarious state due to the current administration's agenda. However, the overwhelming sentiment was that now is not the time to lose hope. After coming home, I created a poem out of the notes I took using a method I call poetic witnessing. In this particular piece, I use verbatim quotes coupled with interpretive abstractions as a representation of a collection of voices. Although I composed this poem from notes, I invite the audience to read it not as my story but as a humble representation of the collective. It is a hope story dedicated to survivors and future generations.

We Leave Something Beautiful

This moment.

The healing power of telling the story.

The power of truth-telling.

You can’t have healing if you don’t hear the story.

But in a safe place,

with relatives who hold you when you fall apart

and build you back whole.

The body tells the story if you can’t tell it yourself.

Through illness, mental health,

relationships suffer.

Broken traditions and broken bones.

But breaking is not erasing.

We stitch our broken parts with gold dust.

We become something cracked but shimmering.

We leave something good and beautiful.

There was this a-ha moment

I found in a concept – historical trauma.

It was the missing piece;

proof of something I’ve always known.

Freedom to call it something not my name.

Now I listen to my body.

When I have a grievance with myself,

I say it out loud, bring people in.

Art saved me. It saves me.

I’m still healing.

Reclaiming a word.

One word at a time.

Healing is a verb, a journey,

not a final destination.

We leave something beautiful

for those who come after us.

There was always resistance,

resisters,

even though they were teaching us

to be good prisoners.

But there was the art,

the music,

the laughter,

the sunrise.

They see me.

I am not forgotten.

I am enough.

To someone, I am everything.

And today we are leaving something beautiful.

We are still here.

We belong.

We belong everywhere.

We will look into the eyes of our children.

They are all our children.

And we will say:

We wish you joy and pleasure.

We wish you play.

We bring the ocean to you.

The waves, like our breath

reminding you of home.

Here we speak to the heart, to the spirit.

Say it out loud

I am beautiful

Say it out loud

We are beautiful

We are beautiful.

Affilia's leadership and editorial board are dedicated to being a space where diverse ways of knowing are welcome, where our intellectual and disciplinary community will believe you, listen deeply, and work to build us all back whole. We invite critical feminist authors, artists, and creators to join us on this journey. Together, we can imagine, create, build, and leave something beautiful for those who follow in our footsteps.