A DAY WON'T DO: We're Opening the TGBE Portal to the World
Updated: Oct 14
By Wampauw Will | The Get Back Ensemble
Today, in dedication to the disrespect of offering our history a day while leaving the deeper work of truth, dignity, and repair unfinished, we’re opening the TGBE portal to the world.
Let the opening speak for itself.
Indigenous Peoples Day becomes disrespectful when institutions treat acknowledgment as the finish line. A renamed date cannot settle the questions of land, identity, and accountability. Respect has to survive beyond the speeches, the hashtags, and the closing ceremony.
You can’t dress up unfinished business and expect everybody to clap.
Living Indigenous nations deserve respect for their communities, cultures, and self-determination every day. Melanated American families deserve room to investigate and tell their own particular histories, including the connections that official labels may have obscured. Our elders’ names, our hometowns, and the stories carried around our kitchen tables deserve serious attention.
There is documented reason to question how those labels were imposed. In Virginia, registrar Walter Plecker pressured state agencies to reclassify people claiming American Indian identity as “colored.” His actions damaged records of Indigenous identity and complicated the work of documenting ancestry.
Every family’s story requires its own careful investigation. We honor our ancestors by listening to the elders, following the records, and staying honest about what we find.
That commitment lives inside The Get Back Ensemble.
The Get Back begins with remembering your worth. It grows when you recover a name, ask an uncomfortable question, create something of your own, or decide that a setback will no longer write the rest of your story.
The Get Back over Setbacks.
That is the spirit we bring into our designs and the conversations around them. There is room here for grief, anger, beauty, discipline, and the determination to build. Our history carries all of that. So do we.
When we say "Follow the Water", we carry a reminder to pay attention to place: the rivers near our people’s homes, the shorelines they knew, the routes that connected families. The mounds & shell rings that serve there purposes for thousands of years. Water becomes a symbol of continuity, movement, spirituality and return. It asks us to look more closely at where we come from. & to look more closely at who we are!
Spiritually, this opening is a commitment. I carry my ancestors with me through the choices I make, the work I finish, and the care I give to what comes next. Honoring them asks something of my hands as much as my heart.
Opening this portal means putting that commitment into the world.
Explore the designs. Read the stories. Bring your questions. Share the work with somebody who understands what it takes to get back on your feet and stand in your own name.
We are building something we can speak through, grow through, and pass forward. Every piece is an opportunity to carry the message beyond this page.
So let this day meet a response with some weight behind it: creation, memory, ownership, and continued work.
The TGBE portal is open to the world.
Get Back over Setbacks
&
if you ever lose your way remember to Follow the Water.
Peace, Love & GodChalance
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