Meet the Members-Diikahnéhi
ᏏᏲ ᏂᎦᏓ! ᏗᎧᏁᎯ ᏓᏆᏙᎠ, ᏥᏴᏫᏯ, ᏃᏊ ᏔᎵᏍᎪ ᏑᏓᎴ ᎠᏆᏕᏘᏴᏓ, ᎠᏂᎩᎶᎯ ᏓᏆᎵᏗᏅᎥᎢ, ᎠᎴ ᎬᏅᏛᎩ ᏥᏂᎩᎸᎢ.
Hello everyone! My name is Diikahnéhi (they/them) and I prefer to introduce myself in Cherokee, not only because connection to community is vital to me as an Indigenous person, but also because the Cherokee language has no gendered pronouns, so it makes navigating the world as a Two Spirit person that much easier.
Currently living on unceded Shaawanwaki (Shawnee) and ᏣᎳᎫᏪᏘᏱ (Eastern Cherokee) land in what is known to the US empire as Lexington, Kentucky, I spend my days dealing in caffeinated beverages, staring lovingly at my cat, and putting as much joy and care as possible into all of both my human and more-than-human kin.
With a background training in linguistics, I use what institutional knowledge I have had the privilege of gaining in order to volunteer for the cartographic and social justice project called the Decolonial Atlas, where I serve as an Indigenous languages and cultures consultant in making maps that challenge colonial interpretations of the land and seek to empower traditional ways of knowing and being, especially in ways that rival capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, and the ownership colonialism has imposed on the land and our bodies.
I hope to embody the Cherokee principle of ᎦᏚᎩ (literally: in the way of bread) in all that I do— simply put, sometimes, we are the ones who have everything we need to make the bread, and sometimes we are the ones without any bread on the table, but ultimately, we all need the bread to survive, and it is coming together in community, with shared work, shared production, and shared care and respect, that we can assure that everyone has a table to sit at, bread to eat, and someone to eat that bread with. To me, being a barista for the last five years, has shown me that I can put ᎦᏚᎩ into every cup of coffee, knowing that through something as simple as putting espresso into a cup can create community and systems of mutual respect and care.
