Resilience Was Never the Goal

My grandfather refused to let them take his language.
That refusal lives in everything I teach.

For me, Reclamation is not a buzzword.
It has a lineage.

When I trace the language of my thought leadership back to its roots, one thread leads straight back to my Papa, who held onto his Indigenous language so he could continue speaking with his elders. He centered his people, his history, and the values colonization tried to erase.

He used to say, “What they’re not going to do is take this away from me.”

That conviction shaped me.
It is part of where my passion for Unreasonable Reclamation comes from.

In this video, I share the roots of the reclamation language I use in my work: from the Indigenous lens, to the wisdom of the African diaspora, to the voices of thinkers like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and bell hooks, who have long spoken about reclaiming culture, story, and agency.

Resilience was never the goal.
It was how we survived colonization.

Reclamation is how we lead and move forward, together.