Be patient. (Issue #18)

Think on timescales longer than the next quarter... WAY longer.

Author

Chris Musei-Sequeira
June 24, 2025

This photograph shows a human female sitting on a rocky peak in the foreground, toward the lower right. The female is facing toward the left of the photograph and looking downward. She is wearing a red shirt and denim shorts. In the background is the large rock formation referred to as "Half Dome." In the far background are forested mountains with rocky peaks, and a cloudless blue sky. DESCRIPTION FROM SOURCE: "A woman resting at Glacier Point before a view of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park". CREDIT FROM SOURCE: Tuxyso. SOURCE: File:Girl posing at Glacier Point Yosemite 2013.jpg - Wikimedia Commons. (n.d.). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Girl_Posing_at_Glacier_Point_Yosemite_2013.jpg -- Author: Tuxyso on Wikimedia Commons. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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Learn to be patient.

Really! Learn to be patient… because decolonizing is going to take a long time.

In the 1860s, a White-supremacist Scottish-American man named John Muir was touring America when he came upon a massive valley with a huge cliff face at the end of it. Yes: it was the majestic and beautiful Yosemite Valley, now immortalized in Ansel Adams photography. But there was a problem: Yosemite Valley already had people in it. Those people called the valley “Ahwahnee,” roughly meaning “large mouth,” and they called themselves “Ahwahneechee,” the dwellers of the large mouth. By some estimates, there had been people living in Ahwahnee for 8,000 years. But by 1910, over 90% of the Ahwahneechee people were “dead or missing” as a result of colonizer violence… and yet, that doesn’t mean they’re gone.

I live in New York City, which was founded in the 1600s as New Amsterdam: the capital of a literal corporate colony of the Dutch West India Company. When European colonizers came from over the ocean, they discovered multiple peoples here already, such as the Lenape people. These peoples would suffer erasure and “forced migration” at the hands of Europeans... and yet, that doesn't mean they're gone.

Their descendants exist.

Their bloodlines exist.

Their collective memories, millennia in size, also exist.

I want to be exceptionally clear: I do not speak for those peoples. I am not descended from them; my ancestors’ experience of colonization is its own history. But believe me when I say this: those who have thousands of years of memory cannot be conquered by those who can barely think to the next quarter. Those who remember their ancestors cannot be conquered by those who consider body count to be the number one metric of success in “war”… whether located in the so-called “Middle East” or in the so-called “Americas.” 8,000 years of history will not be erased by a mere 500 years of European colonization.

I’d like to believe that the human species will exist 8,000 years from now. Yes, it's hard to envision ourselves so far in the future, given how the world has changed so much over just the last 500. But: the story of this species is continually being written and rewritten. I am well aware that the world I'm trying to build probably will not come into being until long after I'm gone.

What does it look like to have the end goal in mind when thinking on a time span of millennia? Because in the context of decolonizing, that's what being “patient” really means.

So… do we stop planning for tomorrow? Do we stop planning for the next quarter? Of course not. We still plan for tomorrow, and next week, and next year, and the next 100 years, but always in the context of the end goal. We do our tiny little part to get the species closer and closer to that end goal, just a tiny little bit every single day. This journey will absolutely be a “two steps forward, one step back” journey… or indeed a “two steps forward, ten steps back” journey. But this is not just a marathon… it's a marathon relay race. When we get tired, we pass the baton.

That’s real patience. No, it’s not easy, and I'm definitely not a great practitioner of it. But from now on: when I feel tired, when I feel frustrated, and when I feel defeated, I will remember the Ahwahneechee people… a people with 8,000 years of memories and at least another 8,000 years to come.

Where to find the perspectives you’ve been missing

FIRST: Subscribe to the Morning Tinto podcast, where my friend Heather Luna and I use the lenses of oppression and resistance to talk about events that happen right before recording.

SECOND: Subscribe to our professional offers-and-needs networking events announcement list. Heather and I regularly host FREE online events where professionals can offer help (free or paid) and ask other professionals to meet their needs.

THIRD: Follow these awesome folks on LinkedIn:

FOURTH: Forward this issue to people you know who are doing decolonial and anti-oppression work.

Got something to say to me?

I’m Chris, the Principal of CJSC, LLC, and I’m (un)learning along with all of you — so hit the “reply” button and give me a piece of your mind!

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My name is Chris Musei-Sequeira, and I use he/him pronouns. My mother was born in Trinidad and Tobago as a descendant of African slaves brought to the islands during the time of European colonization. She came to the United States of America (USA) at the age of 10. My father is Goan and was born in India, in Mumbai, and raised Catholic and English-speaking. He came to the USA for his graduate studies, where he met my mother.

My sister and I were born in the USA and lived a middle-class life in the suburbs of multiple American cities. I studied aeronautical engineering and technology policy in university, then worked at the Federal Aviation Administration and as an aviation consultant. I've lived in cities up and down the USA East Coast since the age of 18; I now reside in Queens, New York with my wife.

I thank Heather Luna and Lavinia Muth for showing me the importance of publicly expressing our positions. Because of our positions, all of us are very familiar with some aspects of the world while having no idea of other aspects. Positionality expresses how our individual positions affect our relationships with other people and with the world as a whole.

Introductory image: File:Girl posing at Glacier Point Yosemite 2013.jpg - Wikimedia Commons. (n.d.). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Girl_Posing_at_Glacier_Point_Yosemite_2013.jpg -- Author: Tuxyso on Wikimedia Commons. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.