Today is the anniversary of several uprisings and rebellions around the world, including by Pueblo peoples, Tlingit peoples and Nat Turner’s rebellion – all fighting to reclaim their land or their own bodies. It is also the day Captain James Cook formally claimed eastern Australia and renamed it New South Wales – ignoring the existence of the original inhabitants and how they named and related to their land. So today’s prompt is about land and our relationship to it as territory, and to ourselves as territory as well.
Think about your territory – whether that is your personal space, your body or the country you live in. What are the edges or limits of it? What fights have you had to protect or liberate it? Is it still occupied by oppressors? Find some way to map it with text – chart a route through it, describe the borders of it, or write about a particular battle you have fought in it. Or, write the manifesto, constitution or origin myth of it.
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