Project write up: Heritage Sites and Ceremony from Bed to Land (2025)

moira williams & Naomi Ortiz

Disabled communities do not regularly have access to the environment in the ways that able-bodied people engage with or perceive nature. For us it can mean moving along the edges of parking lots, sharing images, sounds, or ceremony experienced from our window while in bed to physically being in the land. 

We are two Indigenous disabled people. One of us lives within the American Sonoran Desert and the other in the Long Island, New York Pine Barrens; each are unique bioregions. How do we as Indigenous disabled people access, engage, and move with these lands when we are immobile? 

During a year-long weekly call and response process we will trace these lands listening for story and medicine which disrupts the land’s colonial history/state. We will reimagine our place within these landscapes through our lived experiences, embodied research, interdependent art-making together with Disability Justice, Environmental Humanities, and IndigiTech to share, connect to the land, move outside our bodies, and care for one another. By cripping stasis and immobility, pairing each with the Indigenous wisdom that, “all ceremony is for the purpose of movement,” (Maria de la Cruz, Birthworker), we will confront this perceived contradiction and broaden the definition of mobility to encompass relationships between bed and land.