Body-Land: Embodied Memory, Coloniality, and Resurgence Across Abya Yala and Turtle Island

Abstract

This essay theorizes the body-land, a living site where colonial violence, displacement, and resurgence converge through a hemispheric dialogue between Indigenous and decolonial feminisms from Abya Yala and Turtle Island. Drawing on Lorena Cabnal’s concept of the body-land as the primary terrain of colonial invasion and regeneration, María Lugones’s analysis of the coloniality of gender as a system that fractures body, land, and relations, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s theory of embodied relational resurgence, and Diana Taylor’s notion of the repertoire as embodied memory beyond the archive, the essay argues that silence, gesture, and affect function as insurgent practices of knowledge transmission that contest colonial modes of erasure. Through an autoethnographic narrative spanning displacement from Villarrica, Tolima, and re-rooting on the territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations, the analysis traces how colonial grammars of race, gender, and territory are inscribed in the body. Yet these embodied inscriptions also generate practices of resurgence. By bringing Cabnal, Lugones, Simpson, and Taylor into direct conversation, the essay demonstrates that resurgence must be understood as an embodied, relational, and hemispheric process, one in which the body becomes a generative territory for reimagining belonging and repairing the fractures of colonial modernity.

1. Introduction: Embodies Memory and Land

The body remembers; it carries traces of land and loss, of unspoken languages, of violences that have shaped generations. The body is not a fixed or contained entity; it is porous, a living archive through which ancestral echoes travel across time and geography. It holds both the silences that were passed down and the insurgent memories that refuse to be erased. To live in this body of mine is to inhabit layers of displacement and belonging, to feel the weight of what has been taken and the persistence of what endures. As such, this piece asks, how does the body become a site where memory, dispossession, and resurgence converge across geographies of exile? This essay argues that the body functions as a living territory, an embodied site where colonial violence, displacement, and resurgence meet. Drawing on Lorena Cabnal’s cuerpo-territorio (body-land), María Lugones’s analysis of the coloniality of gender, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s theory of relational resurgence, and Diana Taylor’s concept of the repertoire, I argue that memory, silence, and gesture operate as embodied practices of transmission that resist the extractive logic of the colonial archive. By framing the body-land as both wound and possibility, I show how feminisms in Abya Yala and Turtle Island illuminate violence inscribed on the body-land while generating everyday practices of re-territorialization, relationality, and resurgence across geographies of exile. My reflections emerge from a lived geography that moves between Villarrica, Tolima, where my family fled the Colombian armed conflict, and the lands of the x_wməθk_wəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations, where I arrived as a young refugee. Across these geographies, the body becomes a bridge and a border, a space where violence, remembering, and the yearning for home converge. In narrating this journey, I trace how colonial grammars of dispossession such as war, racialization, and exile continue to reverberate through the body, yet also how embodied memory can become a site of resurgence and reterritorialization. Situated within feminist decolonial thought, this autoethnographic narrative does not seek to generalize an experience of exile, but rather to think with and through the body as a decolonial archive. Following Diana Taylor’s notion of the repertoire, I understand the body’s gestures, tremors, and silences as modes of remembering that exceed the written word. Through this lens, exile is not only a physical displacement but also an affective rupture that exposes the deep entanglement between body, land, and belonging. By weaving personal memory with theoretical reflection, this essay asks how the legacies of colonial violence move through us, and how, in remembering, we might also begin to remake the world otherwise.

2. Mama Tulia’s Choice

Mama Tulia’s life embodies a paradox. Coming from wealth and prestige in Bacatá, colonially known as Bogotá, she crossed the bounds of her family’s expectations by falling in love with a Muysca man, Papa Segundo. That act ruptured her ties to her white, politically renowned family, who disowned her for loving an Indigenous man. Yet within that fracture lay another. Despite choosing Papa Segundo, Mama Tulia later sought to erase the traces of his and their children’s Indigenous ancestry through everyday practices of regulation and correction. She banned the use of Muysccubun in the home and policed bodily markers of Indigeneity through comments about skin tone, facial features, and comportment, subtly disciplining the body. Kinship itself became a site of whitening as Mama Tulia sought to secure her children’s proximity to whiteness through marriage by orienting belonging toward proximity to whiteness rather than toward the land-based relations that had once sustained them. Mama Tulia frequently invoked the language of “mejorar la raza” (better the race), a phrase widely used in Colombia to signal aspirations toward social mobility through whitening. In this context, whiteness functioned less as a measurable phenotype than as a colonial ideal associated with respectability, security, and distance from Indigeneity. When my Guagua was married at fourteen, the decision was not guided by material stability as was custom; my grandfather had no land, no house, and no wealth to offer, but his embodiment of this ideal, white skin, blond hair, and blue eyes, reflecting the enduring logic of mestizaje as aspiration. As Diana Taylor reminds us, “the mestizo and mestizaje are inseparable from conquest and colonization” (Taylor 2003, p. 95). Her desire to whiten the family line, then, was not an isolated choice but part of a longer colonial performance, an embodied enactment of mestizaje as both aspiration and erasure. Through this lens, mestizaje becomes legible as what María Lugones theorizes as the coloniality of gender, a system that naturalizes hierarchy by racializing and feminizing bodies, teaching us to internalize the logics of conquest (Lugones 2010, p. 747).

Where Lugones identifies the gendered and racialized structure of these desires, Lorena Cabnal helps us understand their territorial consequences, where whitening did not only reshape kinship, it severed the body-land, the inseparable relation between body and land as the primary site of colonial invasion and of possible healing (Cabnal 2017, p. 100). Cabnal’s framework deepens Lugones’s insights by locating the dismemberment of relation not only in subjectivity but in the very geography of Indigenous life. Read together, they reveal that the colonial transformation of gender is simultaneously an erosion of land-based relationality. Mama Tulia’s rejection of Muysca language, ceremony, and belonging was thus not simply personal but enactment of what Lugones describes as “the colonization of memory, and thus of people’s senses of self, of intersubjective relation, of their relation to the spirit world, to land, to the very fabric of their conception of reality” (Lugones 2010, p. 745). Her choices were, in effect, performances within a colonial repertoire of improvement, where intimacy and kinship were reshaped by empire’s demand for purity.

These wounds reverberate across generations. The stigma my mother inherited on being called ‘the dark one’ among her siblings, learning to distrust her own reflection, was part of this colonial pedagogy that disciplines the body. This pedagogy did not end with childhood. In Canada, my mother has been shouted at on buses, refused service in pharmacies, and subjected to routine hostility. Yes, she consistently reframes these encounters as misunderstandings, individual bad days, or communication failures. Her refusal to name racism is not ignorance but an effect on what Lugones identifies as coloniality’s epistemic violence which restructures perceptions and memory, making racial harm difficult to name without risking rupture (Lugones 2010, p. 745). To acknowledge racism would require confronting the colonial wound that taught her survival depended on silence. Silence, then, becomes both a survival strategy and a wound; it protects against external violence even as it deepens internal fractures. And yet, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson reminds us, these embodied silences are themselves “teachings in motion,” forms of knowledge that live through affect, gesture, and relation (Simpson 2017, p. 28). Here Simpson extends Cabnal; if the body-land reveals where violence takes root, Simpson shows how relation and resurgence continue moving through the very bodies shaped by that violence. Moreover, through Diana Taylor’s notion of the repertoire, I see how these teachings are carried not through formal archives but through trembling, denial, tone, and posture, the embodied transmissions that persist despite erasure (Taylor 2003). Taylor and Cabnal, read together, show that memory is both territorial and performative; what colonialism suppresses in the land resurfaces through the body’s gestures, and what is silenced in language is carried in affect. Lugones and Simpson similarly converge in revealing that the coloniality of gender attempts to discipline embodied relation, even as Indigenous resurgence continually reanimates it.

My Guagua’s (grandma’s) dark skin, my mother’s refusal to name racism, and my family’s rejection for looking like I do are all inscriptions on the body-land that show how coloniality operates through dispossession of territory and of the self. Yet within these fractures persist fragments of survival; the Muysca names that still sound in my mouth, the memory of the land where food was cultivated, the yearning that refuses silence—these fragments are seeds. They live in my body as absence and as possibility, an invitation to remake relation, to practice resurgence through remembering. Seen through this hemispheric conversation between Cabnal, Lugones, Simpson, and Taylor, the wound of the body-land becomes the very ground from which I learn to speak, revealing the body as a living territory where colonial dispossession and resurgence continue to confront one another across Abya Yala and Turtle Island.

3. Silence

Following the dismemberments enacted on my family through mestizaje, whitening, and the coloniality of gender, my Guagua’s story brings the analysis into the intimate terrain where theory meets flesh. Her memory enters the essay not as an anecdote but as evidence of how the body-land operates intergenerationally, how the body becomes both the first site of colonial inscription and the first site of resurgence. My Guagua’s story lives inside me in fragments, memories held not in language but in sensation, a handful of photographs, the tremor in my mother’s voice when she speaks her name. As Anzaldúa writes, “[t]o live in the Borderlands means the mill with the razor white teeth wants to shred off your olive-red skin, crush out the kernel, your heart, pound you, pinch you, roll you out smelling like white bread but dead.” (Anzaldúa 1987, p. 217); it is to be ground between erasure and survival. My grandmother lived within these borderlands, not only geographically but ontologically, where colonial pressures to whiten and disappear shaped how she moved, spoke, and mothered. The silences she carried about ancestry, about the land that raised her, about the shame attached to her brown skin now echo through my own body. Her final silence, imposed by ALS, only magnified what was already true; what I inherited was not a language but a pulse, an embodied knowing that something had been severed generations earlier, and yet something still endured.

Where the previous section demonstrates colonial dismemberment; this paragraph examines how memory persists despite it, deepening the theoretical grounding through Cabnal, Lugones, Simpson, and Taylor in conversation. Silence becomes a key analytic, not absence, but what Diana Taylor names the repertoire embodied ‘acts of transfer’ through which knowledge survives when archives fail (Taylor 2003, p. 20). My Guagua’s gestures, her knowledge of medicinal plants, her ways of touching dough, preparing chicha, or holding her pain were part of this repertoire, pedagogies of survival transmitted through the body. This is precisely where Cabnal’s body-land sharpens the analysis. My grandmother’s silences, gestures, and pains were not “private” but territorial expressions, evidence of colonial violence enacted on Indigenous women’s bodies and of the persistent relational ties that survived despite this violence. Her body enacted the simultaneously Cabnal’s description of the body as the first territory invaded, but also the first site where reterritorialization becomes possible (Cabnal 2017, p. 101). Her muted inheritance thus becomes a method, teaching me to listen to my own body, to the lands that received me, and to the stories colonialism sought to bury. Placed in dialogue with Maynard and Simpson, these intimate transmissions become what they call “constellations of co-resistance”, everyday embodied acts that remake relation against the grain of colonial erasure (Maynard and Simpson 2022, p. 7). What my grandmother passed on were not words but movements across worlds, care practices, sensory memories, subtle resistances that refused extinction. Moreover, through Lugones I can see how my grandmother’s silencing was not simply personal pain but a manifestation of the coloniality of gender, the transformation that attempted to reorder memory, relationality, spirituality, and land into hierarchical systems that devalued Indigenous women’s bodies and cosmologies (Lugones 2010, p. 754). Yet those same affects, her silence, her tenderness, her endurance, became what slipped through colonial containment, a repertoire of resurgence that insists that absence, too, can be ancestral.

4. Displacement and Exile, Another Grammar of Dispossession

In November 1999, my grandmother (my father’s mother), my mom, my father, and I were living in the village of Villarrica, Tolima when armed guerrilla forces overtook the town. Gunshots cracked through the mountains, explosions stitched the night, and fires circled our home. Those twelve hours of war became an embodied imprint of what Lorena Cabnal refers to as violence against the body-land, the simultaneous assault on bodies and the lands we belong to (Cabnal 2010, pp. 19–20). Every gesture we made that night, when to run, when to hide, how to make ourselves small, became an embodied map of survival etched onto the flesh, because memory is not an abstraction, it is territorialized in the body. The bullet that grazed my forehead, the fire that nearly reached our door, the trembling hands lifting a gas tank off a neighbor’s crushed chest—these are not simply traumatic memories but indices of the colonial geopolitics that structure who is exposed to death and who is protected from it.

For Lugones, these hierarchies are neither incidental nor contemporary; they are the ongoing operations of the colonial/modern gender system, which racializes, genders, and ontologizes populations into categories of the “dispensable.” (Lugones 2010, pp. 743–44). Our flight from Villarrica was, therefore, the predictable consequence of what Lugones calls the colonization of memory and being, where the very terms of humanity are unevenly distributed, leaving Indigenous and racialized communities vulnerable to militarized dispossession across generations (Lugones 2010, p. 745). My father’s mother had fled the same armed conflict in the 1950s; that repetition, war arriving twice in the same body, in the same geography, reveals what Lugones (2010) insists upon, coloniality is recursive, reproducing violence across time by fracturing the body from its ancestral, relational, and territorial grounds. When we fled to Bacatá the next day, I learned to move through the city with the hardened posture of someone who must unsee her own wounds to survive. But the threats followed us, my father’s testimony on national television calling out both the guerrillas and the army triggered more violence, until exile became our only option. Only later did I understand that my displacement did not begin in 1999; it began centuries earlier when Muysccubun was outlawed by Carlos III of Spain (Giraldo Gallego 2013), when Indigenous governance systems were dismantled, when colonial decrees severed the continuity between language, land, and embodied belonging. Cabnal names this despojo del cuerpo-tierra, the tearing apart of body from territory, the colonization of both as intertwined geographies of control and survival (Cabnal 2017, p. 100). Violence, then, does not only destroy homes, but it also dismembers our very sense of self, fracturing the intimate continuities between ancestry, body, and land.

When we arrived in Canada on 3 October 2000, my body carried the residue of these ruptures; fireworks, car backfires, even bursts of laughter sent me ducking for cover. These involuntary movements exemplify what Diana Taylor calls the repertoire, the embodied transmission of knowledge, memory, and survival strategies that exceed the written archive. My body was performing the afterlives of conflict, a repertoire shaped by violence but also by continuity, by the refusal of memory to disappear simply because language falters. Silence became my family’s strategy for survival. My parents avoided all mention of the war; they understood that speaking might tear open a wound that needed to remain sealed in order to endure. But Lugones teaches that silence is also a product of epistemic violence, the colonization of the senses, of connection, of intersubjective relation, making our lives ungrievable and subject to systemic violence and silencing (Lugones 2010, pp. 743–44). When my grandmother died of cancer within a year of our arrival, followed by childhood friends and later my father to the same illness, I began to see how coloniality reproduces itself through slow violence too, the after effect of war and violence, war trauma, poverty, the accumulation of harm across bodies that empire has rendered disposable.

Once I learned English, teachers told me I was lucky, but luck felt like a colonial contradiction, a refusal to see how displacement scars the psyche and rearranges the body’s sense of safety. When Latino boys beat me for “looking Indian,” I understood with clarity how the coloniality of gender fractures communities from within, producing subjects who mirror the logics of whiteness against their own kin (Lugones 2010). This moment helps clarify that coloniality is an affective regime, shaping desire, hatred, and belonging at the level of embodiment. The first space where I felt breath return to my body was a program for immigrant and refugee youth. In that collective space, crying, dancing, telling stories, we enacted what Taylor describes as acts of transfer, embodied forms of knowledge-sharing that create community through gesture and presence (Taylor 2003, p. 20). But the turning point came when an Indigenous auntie spoke of her residential school experience; I learned then that we were living on the territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations. I realized that my refuge had also been my entry into other people’s ongoing dispossession. This recognition became a lesson in constellations of co-resistance, the concept introduced in the previous section expanded here as relational spaces where oppressed communities recognize shared structures of violence and create possibilities for solidarity not based on sameness but on ethical accountability (Maynard and Simpson 2022, p. 7). On Coast Salish territories, I began to see the hemispheric echoes between Abya Yala and Turtle Island, militarism, extraction, state terror, racial violence, and, crucially, the hemispheric resonances of Indigenous resurgence. Living here taught me that exile is never only a story of loss, it is also an invitation to re-enter relation, to understand that healing and accountability are inseparable, that belonging must be built through responsibility to the land and its peoples, not through erasure.

5. Body-Land

To think of my body as territory is to understand it as a living geography, a terrain shaped by invasion, war, silence, and survival, because as Lorena Cabnal asserts, the body-land is both the first site of colonial invasion but also the first site of recovery; as it holds the scars of epistemic, racial, and sexual violence while also harboring the seeds of memory, affect, and resistance (Cabnal 2010, pp. 100–1). My skin, my gestures, and the tremors in my voice all bear the sediment of a colonial order that sought to discipline, whiten, and forget. Yet they also carry what could not be erased, traces of Muysca breath, the pulse of ancestral soil, and the murmur of words I do not fully know but that rise like small rebellions inside my mouth.

Understanding my body as territory through Lugones’ coloniality of gender crystalizes how colonialism reorganizes life by fracturing body from land, gender from power, and intimacy from reciprocity (Lugones 1994, pp. 459–60). This logic of separation is not metaphorical, its effects live in the racialized and gendered hierarchies imposed on our kin, in the internalized shame that marked my family, in the dismembering of land-based relations. To reclaim the body as territory, then, is to refuse this colonial grammar of purity, possession, and improvement; it is to re-enter the relational worlds that coloniality sought to sever. Thus, against these imposed separations relationality becomes the ground for resurgence. My body is not a fixed site but, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson reminds us, a shifting “constellation of relations,” (Simpson 2017, p. 215). It moves through violence and exile, crossing mountains and oceans, weaving connection between geographies that empire worked to isolate from one another. Lugones helps clarify this movement, as learning across difference, encountering each other “as resisters to the coloniality of gender… without necessarily being insiders” to each other’s worlds (Lugones 2010, p. 753). In this sense, my practice of body-territory reclamation becomes a cross-hemispheric act, an embodied dialogue between Abya Yala and Turtle Island where resurgence is learned through relation rather than bloodline or purity.

Simpson names these relational gestures the everyday acts of resurgence, those small, often intimate practices that sustain Indigenous life and rebuild worlds from within the rubble of colonialism (Simpson 2017, p. 192). In my life, they live in the way I speak the family names that were meant to disappear, Nempeque, Piracoca, in the ceremonies I (re)learn from memory, in the moments when I listen for what land, waters, and spirits are trying to say. These practices are not incidental; they activate Taylor’s repertoire, the embodied mode of transmitting memory through gesture, song, story, ritual, and the non-verbal knowledge that refuses to be captured, or controlled by the colonial archive (Taylor 2003, p. 41). Through the repertoire, the body-land becomes not only a site of injury but a site of continuity, where ancestral presence survives through movement, breath, and relation.

In this weaving of Cabnal, Lugones, Simpson, and Taylor, the body emerges as both archive and insurgent territory. The body-land learns to hold contradiction, to carry love and violence in the same breath (Cabnal 2017). Through it, a decolonial project begins, one that unlearns the colonial logic of separation (Lugones 1994, p. 459), reorients us toward relational accountability (Simpson 2017), and insists on embodied memory as a form of resistance (Taylor 2003). My body becomes a site of political tenderness where healing and struggle are inseparable, where wounds do not simply close but transform. This is the shared promise in Cabnal, Lugones, Simpson, and Taylor, a project that begins in the body, unfolds through relation, and survives through the everyday acts of resurgence that refuse disappearance (Simpson 2017, p. 246).

6. Resurgence and Relation

Resurgence begins where survival becomes more than endurance, where breathing, remembering, and caring for one another become insurgent acts that refuse the colonial demand to disappear (Simpson 2017, pp. 233–34). These teachings have come to me not only through texts but through the gendered bodies who carry rivers in their voices, who plant seeds in scorched soil, who rebuild homes on stolen land. Their gestures constitute Taylor’s (2003) repertoire, through embodied acts that transmit knowledge, memory time itself shifts. They interrupt the colonial temporality that measures life through extraction, acceleration, and productivity. Instead, they enact a different temporality, one rooted in care, reciprocity, and the slow pulse of land, what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson describes as the grounding rhythm of Indigenous relational life (Simpson 2017, p. 97).

Living again in Colombia, in the territories where I was displaced from, has taught me that survival here, as in Turtle Island, is never passive. It is a form of presence-as-resistance, a relational insistence that life continues despite ongoing imperialism, militarization, racial capitalism, and extractivism. The violences of Abya Yala reverberate across Turtle Island, and so do the resistances. Indigenous resurgence on these lands reveals that relation is a political responsibility(Simpson et al. 2012), an ethic that binds freedom to the practice of care (Simpson 2017, p. 97). Resurgence appears in ceremony, storytelling, food sovereignty, language revival, and collective mourning; it is the fulfillment of responsibilities to land, water, and kin; it lives in the rebuilding of homes after state violence and in imagining futures our grandparents were denied (Kermoal and Altamirano-Jiménez 2016; Simpson 2017; Starblanket 2024).

Cabnal’s body-land deepens this understanding by reminding us that regeneration begins with the body, that healing land and healing the self are an inseparable process (Cabnal 2017, p. 102). To return to the body-land is to recognize that displacement is not only geographic but also somatic, spiritual, and epistemic. In this sense, resurgence is not simply political, it is corporeal. It requires re-inhabiting the territory of the body that colonialism sought to fracture, Lugones’s critique of the coloniality of gender becomes indispensable, where resurgence requires resisting the modern/colonial gender system that dismembers communal life, devalues relationality, and imposes hierarchies that sever women, land, and kin from one another (Lugones 2010, pp. 743–44). Against this fragmentation, resurgence becomes a reweaving of relations, a restoration of what the colonial gender system worked to dismantle. Reciprocity, then, is not merely ethical; it is decolonial labour, the slow, deliberate practice of learning to stand with, rather than speak for others, recognizing our entangled struggles across hemispheres and histories. To live, nurture, and dance again after unspeakable loss is to declare, as Simpson argues, that the colonial project has failed (Simpson 2017, pp. 96, 247). Resurgence becomes the everyday practice of re-membering, of putting back together what was torn apart, through relation with ancestors, land, waters, and those whose pain mirrors our own. It is a refusal to let colonial rupture sever the thread of continuity, to survive by keeping that thread unbroken, illuminating pathways toward collective continuance, to become in Maynard and Simpson’s words, “a constellation of co-resistors,” (Maynard and Simpson 2022, p. 7).

7. Conclusions: Belonging and Refusal

The body, then, becomes the ground where memory, dispossession, and resurgence converge across geographies of exile, which is the central question of this essay. Cabnal’s (2010) body-land makes clear that the body is the first site colonized and therefore the first site through which return must be enacted; it is a terrain where ancestral memory, intergenerational pain, and the living pulse of land are entangled. This aligns profoundly with Lugones’s (2010) theorization of the coloniality of gender, which operates by severing body from land, spirit from relation, and women from communal authority. If Cabnal names the wound, Lugones reveals the mechanism through which it was imposed, a colonial project that territorialized gendered bodies as objects to be regulated, extracted from, and disciplined. Yet the same terrain that carries the wound also holds the possibility of resurgence. Taylor’s (2003) repertoire helps illuminate how the body refuses erasure through gesture, breath, silence, and ceremony, forms of embodied knowledge transmission that escape the colonial archive. Where coloniality sought to break relation, the repertoire restores it through affective, embodied memory. In this sense, Cabnal, Lugones, and Taylor are not separate frameworks but parts of a single analytic, the body as a site where colonial fragmentation and decolonial continuity confront one another.

Moreover, Simpson’s (2017) resurgence is rooted precisely in these embodied, everyday practices that refuse disappearance. It is enacted not only in dramatic moments of resistance but in the quiet work of sustaining life, singing, planting, mourning, teaching, and breathing, acts that reassert relationality as a political order. When read alongside Taylor, Simpson’s work shows how the repertoire becomes a method of resurgence; when read alongside Cabnal and Lugones, resurgence becomes a counter-practice to the coloniality of gender, a reweaving of relations. In this interplay of theories, the body emerges as more than a site of memory, it becomes a generative territory, where imagining otherwise is itself insurgent. As Anzaldúa reminds us, transformation begins in the imaginal, because “nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads” (Anzaldúa 1987, p. 109). Paired with Simpson’s resurgence, Anzaldúa helps clarify that resurgence is both visionary and embodied, it requires dreaming otherwise while enacting those dreams through practice.

To inhabit the body as territory, then, is to remember and imagine otherwise, to hold memory as resistance and relation as method across the shifting landscapes of exile. This is where return begins, not in a singular homeland but in the resurgence of languages long silenced, in the trembling of hands that recall the earth’s rhythm, in the collective breath that refuses disappearance. Through this body-land, resurgence becomes the embodied insistence that what was dispossessed can be regenerated, that relation can be renewed despite rupture. In this sense, to live in the body-land grounded in accountability, reciprocity, and collective continuance is part of life worlds centered in the “constellation of co-resistors” (Maynard and Simpson 2022, p. 7). The body remembers, but it also reimagines, it grieves, and it also generates. It holds the wound, and it becomes the site from which resurgence unfolds. And in that entanglement, in that unfinished weaving of memory, land, exile, and relation lies the answer to the original question this essay poses; resurgence begins in the body because the body is where colonialism tried to end us; thus, it is precisely where we refuse to end.