Writing from colonial trauma: Land, knowledge, and indigenous refusal

Abstract These reflections examine how colonial trauma, inflicted on both Indigenous lands and the bodies of those who inhabit them, continues to shape the lives of Indigenous communities on Nicaragua's Caribbean Coast. Weaving personal narrative with Indigenous feminist theory and decolonial methodology, I analyze how land dispossession produces environmental harm alongside epistemic, emotional, and embodied forms of violence. Drawing on cuerpo‐territorio as articulated by Latin American Indigenous feminists, and the claim that violence against land is violence against people, I examine the layered harms generated by state autonomy laws that promise recognition without justice and by academic gatekeeping practices that question Indigenous legitimacy. In these reflections I approach research as a political practice through which voice, memory, and land‐based relations are reclaimed amid colonial rupture. Through storytelling and critical analysis, I trace my movement from the war‐torn landscapes of Bilwi to classrooms shaped by colonial institutions, showing how writing becomes a site of resistance, care, and refusal. Writing from colonial trauma, this work moves beyond survival toward restoring land‐based knowledge systems, reclaiming Indigenous scholarly authority, and imagining futures grounded in accountability, resurgence, and collective healing.