The smoke inside of us can never be quelled.
Nonfiction | Quill Christie-Peters | Issue 51
Excerpt from On Wholeness: Anishinaabe Pathways to Embodiment and Collective Liberation
“Understanding settler colonial compartmentalization teaches us how to evade it, and ultimately how to return to our wholeness and liberated states of being.”
For much of my life, I focused intently on my specific experiences of settler colonialism in a localized and community-centred context. I dedicated my life to working with Native youth and providing them with anti-colonial education that might allow them to better understand and resist colonialism. Perhaps bolstered by the immense isolation of living and working in remote and rural Northwestern Ontario, I gave my full self to my community at the expense of any semblance of material solidarity with other oppressed groups. Solidarity was something I felt was important—for example, I believed Palestine should be free—but for most of my life I did not extend myself beyond these moral positionings. The urgency of my own community’s survival overtook me, and for the entire decade of my twenties, I compartmentalized my own sense of liberation to be solely about my people.
But then the escalation of the genocide in Gaza in October 2023 changed me completely. Like cold water splashed on my face, so much of the invisibilized scaffolding of settler colonialism and imperialism began to crumble under the weight of this moment. I watched the footage of the genocide in real time and felt my ancestors standing at my side, lighting the fires of my responsibilities that extend to my global relations. I charted the codependencies of the settler colonies, understanding just how much Canada depends on the United States, depends on Israel, depends on the United Kingdom. I began to see the silver threads from the spider, who has worked so tirelessly to lead us into a future of wholeness for all our relations.
I cannot delineate exactly why it took me thirty years to materially orient myself around a free Palestine, but I can speculate that the compartments that settler colonialism makes are so invisible that it obscured the scope of my responsibilities, even as someone who was well versed in the effects of empire, colonialism, and power, and even as someone who was actively working for liberation. I state this here to demonstrate the enormity of what Palestine has taught many of us, what Palestine has woken up in Indigenous peoples across the globe—Palestine has succeeded in eroding some of the deepest infrastructure of empire, and this disintegration will continue to echo throughout this world and beyond. I also state my shortcomings here in order to normalize growth and expel ego from our movements for liberation, and to better understand pathways for the radicalization of our practices of joint struggle. This moment radicalized me, deeply and wholly, and spending time understanding why and how helps me to encourage a deepening of this process in both myself and those around me.
I have been going to rallies for Palestine every single weekend. I go not because I necessarily believe in the rally as a format for change, but because it is the only place where anything makes sense. A group of older Palestinian men, maybe the same generation as my father, beckon me over and tell me they are glad to finally meet the person who cares about Palestine more than they do. We all laugh together. The deep familiarity of a very specific type of humour embraces us. They ask for a photo and I am wearing my regalia. Normally, I might feel hesitant—worried about being swallowed by the limitation of my identity to this often fetishized representation—but instead, I feel grace. There have been so many moments of passing tension as our communities come together in this critical moment, but they are all filled with such grace. The settler state has never wanted us to truly see one another.
In a practical sense, Anishinaabe liberation can never be full without the liberation of all oppressed people. Palestine taught me this, in my bones and in my body. We are too enmeshed within the larger structures of empire to be able to free our respective communities without also dismantling the rusty and sharp framework of imperialism that encloses us all. With the global visibility of the genocide in Palestine and rising global outrage, imperial powers floundered to maintain power and, in doing so, laid themselves bare. We were able to witness the inner workings of imperialism in broad daylight, with Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada working together tirelessly because one settler colony simply cannot exist without the others. This will be known as their greatest mistake—the radicalization of so many, through the witnessing of clumsy and blatant imperial function and force. On a practical level, we can now deeply understand that compartmentalized approaches to liberation will never be complete. This is not to say that community-oriented work is useless, but rather, that it must be done in conjunction with the global project of liberation, as a beautiful tending to one of the infinite silver threads that bind us together in wholeness and justice, a nod of deep reverence to the spider who weaves us all together.
In a spiritual and moral sense, Anishinaabe liberation must be attentive to our expansive web of creation that includes our relatives in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Haiti, and beyond. Our responsibilities as Anishinaabe people have always traversed the expansive universe, but the urgency and overwhelm of colonial violence on our bodies and lands over generations has slowly compartmentalized our sense of responsibility to exclude our global human relations. Our responsibilities as Anishinaabe people cannot be compartmentalized to a web of creation that is limited by the settler colonial imagination. My ancestors told me so when they wailed beside me while I watched videos on my phone of displaced families being carpet bombed. My homelands told me so when they welcomed my Palestinian kin to our homelands in Treaty 3 territory with a loud crack of thunder and all the animals of the land coming to greet them. The spirits told me so when they helped me dream up a future of bound Anishinaabeg and Palestinian wholeness. It is precisely my Anishinaabe identity, my wild and flickering body and the sacred smoke inside of me, that insists on an expansion of liberatory practice.
Understanding settler colonial compartmentalization teaches us how to evade it, and ultimately how to return to our wholeness and liberated states of being. As an Anishinaabe person, I refuse the compartmentalizations that attempt to render my body separate from my ancestors, my homelands, and all that I am and will be. As an Anishinaabe person, I refuse the compartmentalizations of my sense of liberation and justice that attempt to prevent my whole-body investment in global struggles against colonialism and imperialism. As an Anishinaabe person, I refuse the compartmentalizations of my child from the children of Palestine that attempt to keep me locked in an individualized notion of responsibility.
I spill over it all, with ferocity and without pause. I am everything they can never control. I am everything they can never touch. I am everything they can never be. My body, like smoke, travels to Palestine to bear embodied witness. My body, like stardust, flickers with the light of so many ancestors. My body, like water, seeps into every border, every dam, every crack in the imperial framework in order to one day obliterate it. Our greatest tool is the innate ability of our bodies to evade the compartmentalizations they so desperately seek to maintain.
The smoke inside of us can never be quelled.
In the eyes of our children, we can see the great beyond—swirling galaxies and the low moan of creation in their ancient gaze. In their eyes is also the deep knowing, a look of such profound seriousness for someone only days old. Our children travel with the knowledge of what kind of world they are entering. Indeed, it is how they prepare their gifts. They choose their life, despite the violence and the harm. In their gaze is the medicine for the futures we so desperately need. My daughter taught me this. The children of Palestine taught me this.
When we leave the place before birth, we climb onto the delicate spider’s thread that leads us to the earth below, spiralling toward the earth like a leaf in the wind. We descend through the birth canal to meet our new physicalities and the gentle containment of the human experience that now belongs to us. Grief, love, hope, and pain are now ours to carry, held temporarily by the confines of linear time and space, only to be dissolved one day into the sparkling mist of the universe. Born to parents whose bodies may be battered and bruised by the settler colonial world, we open our eyes to greet them. Born to homelands flooded and bombed, cut open, and destroyed, we extend our arms to cradle them. Despite the harsh and violent world that awaits, we still carry inside our bodies the swirling smoke that whispers to us visions of a sweet and just future. And so, we choose to persist.
Excerpted with permission from On Wholeness: Anishinaabe Pathways to Embodiment and Collective Liberation by Quill Christie-Peters. ©2025 Quill Christie-Peters. Published by House of Anansi Press www.houseofanansi.com
Quill Christie-Peters is an Anishinaabe educator and self-taught visual artist from Lac des Mille Lacs First Nation located in Treaty 3 territory. She is the creator and director of the Indigenous Youth Residency Program, an artist residency for Indigenous youth that engages land-based creative practices through Anishinaabe artistic methodologies. She holds a master’s degree in Indigenous governance on Anishinaabe art-making as a process of falling in love. She has spoken at Stanford University, the University of Toronto, and California College of the Arts, and her written work can be found in GUTS magazine and Canadian Art. She is also a mother, beadwork artist, and traditional tattoo practitioner following the protocols of her community. All of her work can be found at @raunchykwe.
On Wholeness: Anishinaabe Pathways to Embodiment and Collective Liberation by Quill Christie-Peters House of Anansi Press, 2025
A brilliant exploration embodied wholeness as a pathway to our collective liberation
Through reflections on childbirth, parenting, creative practice, and expansive responsibility, Anishinaabe visual artist Quill Christie-Peters explores how reconnecting with the body can be an act of resistance and healing. She shows that wholeness—despite pain and displacement—is not just possible but essential for liberation, not only for Indigenous people but for all of us.
In poetic and raw storytelling, Quill shares her own experiences of gendered violence and her father’s survival of residential school, revealing how colonialism disconnects us from ourselves. Yet, through an Anishinaabe lens, the body is more than just flesh—it extends to ancestors, homelands, spirit relations, and animal kin.
This fierce and enlightening book reimagines the way we understand settler colonialism—through the body itself. On Wholeness takes us on a journey that begins before birth, in a realm where ancestors and spirits swirl like smoke in the great beyond.
