WE ALL RIDE

Movement has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. I grew up running and dancing, practicing martial arts, yoga, and swimming. I used my body to act out the many emotional and physical traumas I had endured. I believed that my physical strength could mask the turmoil I carried and will probably always carry with me.  

Riding my bike on the other hand, performed a totally different function in my life. I was raised with my Yaqui traditions and have never known a life when Mother Earth and our more-than-human relatives (plants, animals, ecosystems, ocean, and stars) were not at the center of our existence. To say that I became an environmentalist at a certain age denies the generations-long connections that my relatives have to the natural world. Riding a bike was for me a mode of transportation that did not contribute to global warming, it was the thing that connected me to other activists when we took to the streets in San Francisco’s Mission District fighting evictions or during critical mass. My bike brought me everywhere. Other than my camera, it became the thing that allowed me a kind of freedom so pure and powerful that I began to think of my bike as an extension of my body. My bikes have been such good friends that they even had their own names: Rita, Purple Rain, Burro, and now Celia Cruise and Wilma Mankiller to name a few.  

Cycling can be inherently solitary, and like every person in the world, I craved community more than anything these last few years. Native Women Ride was meant to be the antidote for what felt like the second coming of the apocalypse (Native people have already survived an apocalypse...It’s called genocide). But was social media really the place to do this? 

What is impossible to fully express here is the level of trust it takes to build and sustain an Indigenous community while also respecting how distinct we are from one another. There are more than 570 federally recognized tribes, numerous state-recognized tribes, and many that have lost or not received recognition. We have grown wary of western society’s extractive nature, and social media is not exactly a safe place to begin with. Creating trust is a lifelong process. It requires commitment for the benefit of the community and never for the individual. I knew that everything I did, who I highlighted, how I used my words, what I fundraised for would be scrutinized and potentially taken out of context. What people might not know is that each person I highlight, I aim to connect with personally and for life. This is how Native communities work, always operating for the betterment of us all today while laying the groundwork for the next seven generations. Native Women Ride was never going to be “just” a social media page. It had to be a community.

My biggest fear is exploitation, tokenization and entitlement in a space created by and for Native people. I think it is important to mention here that social media is still media and needs to be treated as such when it comes to historic representations of Native people in media and pop culture. I realize that social media can function in a variety of ways, but what I am trying to build virtually has the exact same expectations as if it were a brick-and-mortar community center. What I can’t control is who follows me and how colonial they act on my page. Just like the land, this virtual community is for us, and I intend to protect it. 

I feel like I’m telling a scary story, but I kind of am because this is bigger than bikes. Fact 1: Cycling is a predominantly white cis-gender-male dominated sport. Fact 2: So is cycling on social media. Fact 3: When non-white people attempt to enter a space dominated by white people, we have historically been unwelcomed. Fact 4: Cycling on social media is no different. You see where I’m going, right? When people of color come together in a space designated for whiteness, there will always be barriers to entry. Cycling as a sport already has barriers to entry, including financial constraints, time to train, access to equipment, safe places to train, race entry fees, travel and lodging at races, not to mention physical ability.