I live and work on the unceded territory of Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang, colonially known as Montréal, a gathering place for many Indigenous Nations, including the Kanien’kehá:ka, who are recognized as traditional stewards of these lands.

As a PhD student at Dalhousie University, I acknowledge that the university operates within the unceded and ancestral territories of the Mi’kmaw, Wolastoqey, and Peskotomuhkati Peoples, sovereign Nations whose inherent rights as original stewards of these lands precede and exceed any colonial structure. The Peace and Friendship Treaties, which remain in effect, are not historical relics. They name concrete obligations to these Nations, obligations that bind everyone present on these lands, including me. Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 recognizes and affirms these rights. Their actual application remains a political responsibility, not only a legal one.

African Nova Scotian communities have been present in Mi’kma’ki for over 400 years, rooted in over 52 land-based settlements, sustaining a resistance to anti-Blackness and systemic violence that runs as long as that presence. This is a distinct history, a distinct people. As a Black researcher working on these same lands, I am not outside that history. I arrive on Mi’kma’ki with my own position within racial structures these communities have inhabited far longer than I have, and that difference carries a specific responsibility.

I am a registered social worker. The profession has functioned as a colonial instrument: it is in its name that Indigenous children were removed from their families, placed in residential schools, transferred by force into white homes. These practices are not finished. Child welfare systems in Canada continue to target Indigenous and Black children and families at disproportionate rates. I am not removed from this history because I distance myself from it individually. I am located within it by my training, my designation, and my membership in a profession that has not yet fully accounted for what it has done. My decolonial and abolitionist commitments are not a response to something else. They are a direct response to this.

These colonial and racial structures run through my work. As a researcher, writer, and member of the kiki ballroom community, I recognize that they operate even in spaces that claim to refuse them. Ballroom is, for me, a site of speculative care, political practice, and survival for Black queer and trans people. It is where I learned that the questions my research tries to hold can be asked otherwise.

Decolonization is not a metaphor. The commitments I carry are grounded in abolitionist and decolonial practice, attentive to Black queer and trans life, rooted in mutual aid and accountability rather than representation. I affirm the return of land, resources, and power to Indigenous Peoples, and I stand in solidarity with Indigenous and Black communities across Turtle Island who resist colonial violence and who have long practiced survival as a collective act and a form of imagination.