Field Notes from The Bloody Corners

I’ll be working on my next project in Friendship, NY — a place once called The Bloody Corners, named for the settler-colonial violence that soaked this ground long before we arrived with our tidy stories.

The land remembers what we forget.

The soil keeps what power tries to bury.

I am learning to listen —

to what the wind carries,

to what the river refuses to release,

to what the stones still hold in silence.

Violence has a pulse.

It repeats, adapts, and disguises itself.

It infiltrates language and builds monuments out of erasure.

It teaches us to believe that conquest is normal.

But what if courage looked like unlearning?

What if repair starts by speaking true names,

by acknowledging both the harm and the yearning?

This place — Friendship — holds a tension.

A name that points toward a future not yet realized.

A longing to become something other than the violence that named it.

I’m here, as a trans theologian, as a migrant of spirit and soil,

to trace the interlocking rhythms of harm and hope

and to ask how story might become salve.

Maybe if we speak differently,

we will learn how to live differently.

Maybe Friendship is not a legacy —

but an invitation.

Reflection Questions

• What does the land you live on remember that you were never taught?

• Where is your language still shaped by conquest or forgetting?

• What might it mean to rename a place — or a story — toward repair?