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Quote by Pooja Agnihotri

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Pooja Agnihotri

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“I brought some cat food for Glen on the way home. The thing about Glen is that, despite her offhand manner, she loves me. I know she's only a cat. But it's still love; animals, people. It's unconditional, & it's both the easiest & the hardest thing in the world. [...] It isn't annoying, her need - it isn't a burden. It's a privilege. I'm responsible. I chose to put myself in a situation where I'm responsible. Wanting to look after her, a small, dependent, vulnerable creature, is innate, & I don't even have to think about it. It's like breathing. For some people.”

“Growing up, those of us who had to put a hyphen before "American" got scoffed at for sending money home to cousins in the old country or supporting aging parents here on green cards. But you used to shake your head and tell me how, back home, nobody put their parents into nursing homes or let their kin go hungry. The same thing lives on among Sami's queer and trans friends of color, he tells me, crowdfunding for medical care and housing online, or in the group chats he tells me about where friends help one another escape abusive relationship or housing crises with safety planning and couches to sleep on. We take care of one another because no one else will, eh says. But every time is a gamble.”

“We hope for a harvest, we pray for rain, but nothing is certain. We say that the harvest will only be abundant if the crops are shared, that the rains will not come unless water is conserved and shared and respected. We believe we can continue to live and thrive only if we care for one another. This is the age of the Reaper, when we inherit five thousand years of postponed results, the fruits of our callousness toward the earth and toward other human beings. But at last we have come to understand that we are part of the earth, part of the air, the fire, and the water, as we are part of one another.”

“What has stayed constant between us is this cycle of losing and finding, this unending transference of vitality, without which we might feel directionless. Love of this sort, however, isn't about making a roadmap to an other who then becomes your compass. It is a proposition to nest in the unrepayable and every-mounting debt of care that stands in opposition to the careless and transactional practices of state power that mire the lives of NDNs and other minoritized populations. Having inherited your philosophy of love, which is also a theory of freedom, nôhkom, I can write myself into a narrative of joy that troubles the horrid fiction of race that stalks me as it does you and our kin.”