Dear My/Our Beautiful Communities
After so much contemplation, I have decided to take on your kind nomination for the CBC Asian Change Maker and we have done film screening today at the FascinAsian Film Festival 2024. Being able to have a moment like this evening felt like a miracle for many reasons – for connection, solidarity building, space making, and shared love.The video creation team was ethical and thoughtful… they were also good listeners. The films they made communicate preciousness of distinctive yet synergistic stories and voices in artistic ways.
The biggest reason why I decided to take this invitation was because of my love, care, and gratitude for my community that sustains my life. With Soil Camp team members and all the communities I am a part of, I learned that community keeps you grounded. It matters that we are a part of a community that is rooting for you.
I see our project as a Community-Building Research and we have together been building communities that amplify love, care, and kindness toward each other but also toward the soil, plants, animals who are a little quieter than humans. I am rejoiced by curiosity, kindness, and brilliance of children we work with. They are full of joy and humor and I smile and laugh a lot with them. My team members are such amazing human beings – each of them is a change maker, who is transforming their communities of influence to a kinder and hopeful place. Community we build together gives me a hope for life, energy to dream, and a reason to survive. I am nurtured by the community I grow together with love. Together with communities I am part of, I will continue to hold multitudes of our life: pain, love, grief, hope, suffering, and joy.
I see our personal and collective experience of pain as an impetus to dream and create a history anew. Histories of Japanese internment or weaponization of STEM for warfare are intergenerational trauma shared with my loved ones. Reflecting o these histories of violence, I strongly feel that Asian identity can go beyond a marker of race, and I see it as a space to amplify solidarity toward justices.
To this land, I am an immigrant settler and I would like to do my best to unsettle my settler identity and continue to learn to remember and actively challenge settler colonialism, systemic violence, and forced displacement happened/happening on this land and globally. As an educator and educational researcher, I acknowledge the past wrongdoings done through schooling on Indigenous communities across the globe and commit to reflect on Canada’s colonial histories, so that we can build more just world. I am grateful for the tremendous gift we receive from the land. With the awareness that I am not entitled to know everything, I humbly listen to generational wisdoms and knowings passed down in Indigenous communities on this land and across the globe. I receive what was shared with me, with humility and responsibility to act.
I also value your push for us to take up a space and make our presence visible in somewhere like the university. I am first one in my family (and still the only one) who went to university – every day I feel like an outsider here as a racialized, immigrant queer living with an illness. Thank you for pushing me to make our collective presence visible and embrace both the pain and beauty of being alive in this world.
With lots of gratitude and love,
Miwa
Check out the CBC Calgary Asian Changemakers 2024 Videos!
Special thank you: All the Soil Camp team members (all who are listed here and beyond – including all the amazing youth, children, and families who are essential members of our team/community – Liana Wolf Leg and Elder Herman Many Guns for all the precious teachings rooted in this land), CCIS Land of Dreams team, TIES GROW team, TELUS Spark Science Centre Indigenous Science Connections team guided by Dr. Kori Czuy.
Special thank-you goes to Anita Chowdhury who put a powerful nomination secretly and as a big surprise. Anita is a wonderful Asian Changemaker with her anti-poverty activism through Mamas for Mamas and also is an amazing art-based community educator.
My special gratitude goes toward the CBC Calgary production team, Ishita Singla, Dyllan Goodman, Avi Randhawa.Thank you, the adjudication committee who saw the power in Anita’s story of nomination. Thank you for all the 90 great Changemakers who were nominated, for all you do in your communities of influence.
I told the CBC production team, “if this is about how great I am, I am not interested. But if I can use this space for my advocacy, I’d be honoured to accept your invitation.” I said this, because this society is full of pressure to do more, to do better, to be better – one of the pressures many Asians and other racialized minorities suffer from. So I was not interested in participating in that kind of harmful discourse. You/we are gorgeous and whole, just the way you/we are.
Miwa Aoki Takeuchi, PhD 