WHY WE EXIST
WINGBEAT 88
The Wingbeat 88 team loves dreaming big! We’re a team - a family - of regular everyday people navigating everyday occasions, just like everyone else. We celebrate achievements, big and small. We also cry about disappointments, hurts, and injustices. We understand that life can be super exciting and sometimes extremely harsh. Together, we talk about the issues that hurt us, keep us stagnant, and slow us from reaching our full potential. Our dream is to come together, respective of our traditional ways of organizing as Indigenous Peoples, to recenter our ancestral ways of caring for one another.
At present, westernized, colonial, hetero-patriarchal approaches to issues we face as Indigenous community members keep us in a place of suffering, fear and encourage storytelling through a deficit narrative. We’ve been told for too long that we’re incapable of helping ourselves. Now is the time to connect and work together, pulling from our ancestral knowledge, to combat local and global issues.
Because our team is primarily Diné, we begin with what we know and work towards building effective kinship organization methods for Indigenous groups around the world. Wingbeat 88’s Kinship Organizing program and app will organize Diné community members by the four original clans of the Diné people. By organizing in this way, we have the power to effectuate and restore balance between all our human and non-human relations.
We imagine first, growing Indigenous representation within present civic engagement systems to bolster advocacy, awareness, outreach, and training of critical Indigenous issues. The lack of Indigenous representation in these systems, from the time they were first forced on our people, continues to negatively impact our quality of life. We envision and pray for leadership that does not replicate colonial systems of oppression. These systems, which were strategically and deliberately built without respect to our traditional and ancestral leadership methods, will never allow us to genuinely support one another in living to our greatest potential as Indigenous people.
So, we begin changing how we lead and care for our people first, by increasing Indigenous representation through participation in voting and election-day events. As we simultaneously organize through our original kinship systems, we’ll naturally begin to implement and stabilize traditional methods of problem-solving and leadership. Finally, as Indigenous people, we’ll be in alignment less with the negative impacts of colonial systems and more with the teachings and survival strategies that bring us together harmoniously with the universe and all its beings.
