Letter from Mapuche activist Moira Millán to Diana Sacayán on LGBT+ Pride Day

Diana, I remember the day we met: we looked at each other and recognized each other, both of us with indigenous faces, I perceived you as a sister of this copper-colored Indo-America.

June 28, 2021

Moira Millán

Dear Diana:

I woke up this morning dreaming of you. I realized you came to shake me up; June 28th is World LGBTQ+ Pride Day, and I honestly hadn't remembered. The dream was so tender it tore at my soul, and I wept for your absence, feeling as if the oppression and tribulation of the night had taken over the world.

Your murder brought rage and pain, but also profound shame. The shame of having done nothing to prevent your death, nor the constant deaths of hundreds of dissident bodies trapped by patriarchal hatred and tortured to death.
A cacophony of screams and ashes, scattered in the hidden corners of forgotten lands, where these beings die, their names not cried out enough, not mourned enough, without justice, all disciplined by a pedagogy that masks with bruises what it refuses to accept, that beats, punishes, and kills, because it fears them.

Diana, I remember the day we met. It was at an event in La Plata. We looked at each other and recognized one another, both of us with indigenous features. I saw you as a sister from this copper-skinned Indo-America. From then on, every encounter brought us joy and strength. Our hurried meetings in the same café on Corrientes Street where I would meet you—your indispensable lucidity helped me formulate strategies. My daughters would run around us, and I would apologize. You would smile at them, and your maternal attitude would put me at ease.

Then came the organization of the 1st March of Indigenous Women, and immersed in the solitude of a racist society that also denies indigenous existence, you supported me, you understood the need to organize ourselves.

Dear Diana, I am ashamed to confess that we have made little to no progress in eliminating lesbophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and all the fears embodied in hateful practices against non-hegemonic beings from Indigenous communities. Our dissident children still suffer mistreatment, abuse, and rape; sometimes they are expelled from their communities and arrive in white cities, where their suffering intensifies because, to the already long list of contempt, they are now added the burden of being racialized. Traveling through these territories, I have witnessed so many injustices; I have seen your childhood reflected in them—that frightened, distrustful, and sad childhood.

Children who only dream of being what they are forbidden, children who receive more beatings than lunches every day, more taunts than compliments, adults passing on to their children the cruelty of intolerance. Uncomfortable with the inclusive "e," written in the blood of so many dead trans women, so many murdered gay men, so many lesbians persecuted, tortured, and often also murdered, and this significant "e" comes to remind us that the others are demanding from their graves: justice!

Yes, it's true: progress is slow. However, I also saw in that childhood the strength of the land inhabiting her body. Ancestral forces, multi-gendered and diverse spirits, return, settling in her heart to offer medicine, ancient songs, or fragments of memory received in dreams. We explain to the world that to defend the land, it's not enough to defend only the tangible ecosystems; we must also defend the perceptible or spiritual ecosystems . And that's when many are surprised to hear our assertion that within these spiritual ecosystems lies gender diversity, that it is the land that is giving courage to embrace these other identities, which challenge patriarchy and therefore
colonization. We will have to decolonize, depatriarchalize, from the forces assembled for life.

Without women, without dissidents, without diversity, there is no chance to sustain life on Earth. As I write to you, I think of Tehuel, who remains missing. Dear Diana, I want you to walk alongside us, through every challenge, every demand, every dream woven together, until we achieve a good life, a right for all, and until the diversity that we are becomes our strength to overcome terricide.

Diana, I promise to search for you in every Relmü, up in the wenu mapu, and I will surely see your beautiful smile in the rainbow, which continues to light the path of justice. You were the obstacle that tried to unblock everything and you are succeeding even though they took your life, your sown efforts are bearing fruit.

I honor your memory: I happily salute the #LGBTIQ+ movement that marches determined to seize its dreams of equality and freedom for all.

Moira Millán June 27, 2021, Lof Pillañ Mawiza, Corcovado, Chubut.

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