By Ashley Caranto Morford
Content Note: Please be aware that this article discusses difficult issues, including human trafficking, genocide, and violence to Indigenous women and children. Please move through this writing with gentleness and care.
Tai Pelli is a Borikén Taíno Arawak advocate and organizer who is actively involved in several organizations fighting for Indigenous, human, and environmental rights. She is the International Relations and Human Rights Officer of the United Confederation of Taíno People (UCTP), Co-President and Co-Founder of the Caribbean Amerindian Development Organization (CADO), and an officer and member of the Board of Directors of the International Indian Treaty Council.
Colonial nation-states occupying Indigenous lands continue to refuse to acknowledge and respect Indigenous Peoples rights. Against this violation, Tai Pelli’s mission is to help Indigenous Peoples to learn and understand their rights so as to defend them — for, as Tai emphasizes, the rights of Indigenous Peoples cannot be taken away: they are either respected or they are violated.
The use of the word Peoples here is political and intentional. To refer to Indigenous Peoples as Peoples is not simply in reference to more than one person. Rather, and crucially, the word Peoples here is an acknowledgment and an assertion of the ongoing self-determination and sovereignty of Indigenous nations.
In early November 2022, I had the honor of speaking with Tai about the continuous organizing work and leadership of Indigenous women fighting against the colonial harms of human trafficking and genocide.
This educating and organizing work remains urgent and necessary. Days after Tai and I spoke, Brackeen v. Haaland was argued in the US Supreme Court, threatening the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). The ICWA importantly works to stop the ongoing and violent legacy of child welfare services forcibly removing Indigenous children from their nations, communities, families, homelands, and cultures. Crucially, Article II (e) of the United Nations Convention on Genocide specifically declares that the forcible transfer of children of one group (national, ethnic, racial, or religious) to another group is an act of genocide. The human trafficking and genocide that have been impacting Indigenous Peoples for centuries started with the colonizer Christopher Columbus trespassing on Taíno lands.
Tai explains that, when he could not provide the gold he had initially promised to the King and Queen of Spain, Columbus turned to human trafficking and he openly stated that the “ideal” people to enslave were Indigenous girls between the ages of nine and ten: specifically, he wrote that “a hundred castellanos are easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand” (qtd by Stark and Hudon 1).
To this day, settlers, settler societies, and settler states continue to see Indigenous women and girls as expendable and disposable commodities for sexual pleasure. Because of this dehumanization, Indigenous women and girls continue to go missing and to be murdered at high rates throughout so-called North America, and the man camps that are illegally set up in Indigenous lands for colonial-capitalist mining and other extractive industries are sites of sexual violence and human trafficking that particularly target and harm Indigenous women.
Tai wants to recognize and honor the Indigenous women doing the work of fighting against these harms are many. And these Indigenous women live all over the world. They are doing this work in their own ways and in the capacities that they can, including those who are working in small-scale ways at the local level, to those who are funded by universities and institutions to do this work, to those doing this work on national and international scales.
This work includes locally rooted movements like the Toronto-based annual Strawberry Ceremony on February 14th, a community-led gathering to honor Indigenous women, girls, Two-Spirit, trans, and queer community members who continue to go missing; nation-wide organizations like MMIW USA, a US-based initiative to bring missing Indigenous women home, to support families and communities grieving their loved ones who have been murdered, and to end ongoing violence against Indigenous women; and projects like Walking With Our Sisters, an art installation commemorating missing and murdered Indigenous women, children, Two-Spirit, trans, and queer community members across the so-called US and Canada.
“In each of these moments,” Tai emphasizes, “the work is being done. If you bring forth your little grain of sand consistently, you will build a strong foundation for others and others will do the same.”
Tai came to her organizing and advocacy work because of a deep and fierce love for her Peoples. Driven by this love, she wanted to address the colonial issues impacting her community. From there, she realized that Indigenous women all over the world are in this fight against colonial violences collectively.
As Tai says, “La lucha es una. The struggle is one.” She encourages Indigenous community members who want to be involved in this organizing work to look for solutions within their own communities and spaces — as this work must begin with, be rooted in, and emerge from Indigenous communities — and to advocate within all the arenas that they can so as to be able to come back to their communities with as much information as possible from which the communities can collectively develop goals, strategies, and solutions.
And, Tai says, “Always speak truth. Say what needs to be said.”
Deepest pasasalamat (gratitude and thanks) to Tai Pelli for talking about these ongoing histories, and for sharing her stories, truths, knowledge, and experiences.
AUTHOR: Ashley Caranto Morford (Filipina-English descent / Canadian-USA) – Associate Writer
