First, they cut our tongues.
They called it salvation. They called it order. They called it love.
They scraped our languages from our teeth, burned our names in their ledgers, rewrote our prayers in foreign alphabets. They carved the river of our memory into narrow channels, shallow enough for conquest.
They told us there were only two ways to be. Only one way to pray. Only one story worth telling.
And still—we remembered.
Not always cleanly. Not always whole.
Sometimes memory survived in a single word, bitter on the tongue. Sometimes it clung to the bones of a song, hummed under breath while the fields swallowed the sound.
Today, we gather those scattered syllables. We stitch them back together—crooked, stubborn, sacred.
Queer Caribbean writers forge poems from Creole, Patois, Kwéyòl—refusing to translate what was never meant for colonizer ears. Two-Spirit kin pull ancient names from the soil, names that outlived the boarding schools and the burned treaties. Afro-Indigenous storytellers trace the echoes of stolen words across continents, piecing together what could not be destroyed.
We are not reviving dead languages.
We are speaking to the living roots they thought they had severed.
Because language is not just words.
It is memory. It is lineage. It is proof that another world once breathed—and can breathe again.
When we say "we were never the mistake," we are not making a wish.
We are speaking a history that colonialism tried to strangle and could not kill.
Language is not neutral.
It is weapon. It is refuge. It is rebellion.
This Pride, we do not beg for inclusion in tongues that once outlawed our existence.
We speak in the battered, beautiful languages they tried to bury.
And every syllable we resurrect is a blade turned back toward the ones who named our silence "progress."
We were never lost.
We were waiting.
