Mapping Our Selves and Our Embodied Freedom Dreams through the Tree of Life

• In Event: Growing, Sharpening and Envisioning Our Tools: The Mapping Carcerality, Imagining Freedom, and (Re)Membering Selves Project

Abstract

Objective. This collective narrative explores how we map ourselves onto and against a punishing world and how we move towards our freedom dreams (Kelley, 2002). As our first collaboration of the trip, we (the youth and adult collaborators) completed the Tree of Life activity to ground ourselves in our lived experiences, draw connections between us, and spark ideas around abolition that we explored during the trip. This paper is a shared story that we crafted/are crafting around who we are, our collective fight against injustice, and how we carve out spaces for dreams, joy, and kinship.

Framework. I developed the Tree of Life activity in alignment with womanist ways of being and knowing as conceptualized by Walker (1983). Womanism is rooted in African humanist philosophies and shaped by intersectional and Black feminisms to illuminate the ways that Women of Color move through the world in love, strength, and solidarity. I also draw from the thinking of Perez (2022), a CHamoru scholar and poet who writes with reverence for our ancestors and the wisdom they have passed on about our boundedness. The Tree of Life engages the natural world metaphorically, theoretically, and methodologically to provide a lens that allows us to understand the hardships, celebrations, and tensions in the context of our collective fight for liberation.

Methodology & Data. The Tree of Life was inspired by my experiences growing up in the Pacific Islands, learning about the significance of trees through stories from my elders, and being sheltered, nourished, and educated by trees that surrounded me. I modeled the activity after Denborough’s (2008) community work on trauma and care with youth, recreating it as reflective, communal mapping to illuminate various elements of our lives that help us survive and flourish in a carceral society (e.g., our homeplaces (hooks, 2007), self-care practices (Lorde, 1988), strengths and values, and the legacies we wish to leave behind). During the retreat’s first day, we developed and shared our Trees. For this paper, we use a collaborative story-sharing method (Anonymous, 2023) to analyze how we honor our families/ancestors, care for ourselves, and build kinship ties in pursuit of our freedom dreams.

Findings & Significance. Our story-sharing session illuminated the ways that a punishing and carceral world robs us of our ancestral wisdom, erodes our sense of self, and tears us apart. From a young mother grieving the “kidnapping” of her baby, to a young man wanting to be free from being known as a “jail bird,” to friends who speak up for and pour into one another, our stories revealed the many layers of harm, hope, and love that define us. Although we all bore the heaviness of these entanglements, through our Trees, we uncovered the sources of our resolve, knowledge, and softness as our stories coalesced to show the connectedness of our suffering, and consequently, our freedoms. This collective story makes contributions to those whose politics and scholarship echo the words of abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Where life is precious, life is precious” (2023).

Authors

• Shena Sanchez, University of Alabama

• Luis Fierros, Learning Works