the cartography of displacement
/rōot/ awakenings post # 28 - on identity, belonging, and sacred geography
I’ve been thinking about what makes us part of a place.
Not legally—that's just paperwork—but spiritually, in the ways that shape who we become through invisible threads connecting our sense of self to a particular country, continent, even the Earth.
I was born and raised in the United States to immigrant parents of Indian descent. Though my dad was born and raised in India, my mom and all her siblings were born and raised in Uganda until 1972, when Idi Amin's expulsion decree targeting "Asians" —as the South Asian community was known within the colonial racial hierarchy—erased their claim to the only home they had ever known. Though much of the family was able to get out before Amin's deadline, two of my uncles left Uganda as refugees, carrying only what would fit in small suitcases—belongings that could be packed, while their sense of belonging and identity as Ugandans had to be left behind.
Though the tension between belonging and documentation has been around for generations, it’s something I’ve been thinking more about since 2016, when I really started to understand that it sits at the heart of something larger—the violence of trying to map human complexity onto borders drawn by those who have the power to hold the pen. It’s the cartography of displacement. The systematic severing of people from places through man-made boundaries that treat our identities like territories to be conquered rather than sacred relationships to be honored.
For most of human existence on this planet, our connection to place was rooted in the land. People belonged to the land—not through papers, but through relationship with that land. This relationship meant they knew which plants healed particular ailments. They understood the language of seasonal shifts because they carried the wisdom of being held by a particular ecosystem across generations in their bodies. They respected the cosmic intelligence of the ecology that surrounded them, choosing to operate from reverence rather than ego.
But there was only a brief window in our collective history of existence when anyone could claim to be "purely" from one place. As soon as humans became nomadic, as soon as we began following herds and seasons and opportunities further away from where we started, our identities became plural. When our modes of travel expanded beyond walking distances—first by sea, then by technologies that could shrink vast distances into mere hours—our relationship to place became even more layered, more complex, more beautifully impossible to contain within the little check boxes that serve as invisible gatekeepers.
Many people aren’t aware that the racial categories we’ve normalized into fact are fairly recent choices, created not to honor human diversity but to justify systems of exploitation. These classifications emerged alongside Jim Crow laws and colonial expansion—bureaucratic tools designed to determine who could be enslaved, who could vote, who could own land, who could claim belonging as an “American.” To say race is a social construct is to acknowledge that these categories weren’t built from biological truth, but from the desire to organize human hierarchy in service of white supremacy.
What gets lost in this history is the understanding that before these artificial mappings, identity was formed through connection to land, to community, to the ecosystems that held and shaped us. The violence of racial categorization wasn't just that it created false divisions between people, but that it severed our understanding of identity from its true source: our sacred relationship with place. This severance becomes the foundation for all displacement that followed.
Once identity was reduced to a racial category, displacement became inevitable and a tool of control. This is the trauma that lives in diasporic bodies. Not just being removed from place, but having your connection to that place retroactively declared illegitimate, not because you've done anything wrong, but because those in power have arbitrarily decided that your existence is inconvenient to the narrative they’re shaping. As if the decades of relationship—of knowing the land's seasons, of being shaped by its rhythms, being held by its solid earth—never mattered because your ancestry and lineage can be traced to somewhere else.
This becomes even more apparent when we consider that the same people writing this narrative are doing so on stolen land, their own ancestry and lineages tied to other places. What makes them more 'American' than me, my parents, or the almost 50 million immigrants who call the US home?
When someone like Zohran Mamdani—born in Uganda, raised in South Africa, carrying South Asian heritage—checks multiple boxes on a form and gets attacked for claiming the full expression of his identity, we're witnessing the same cartographic violence my family experienced decades ago. Belonging is a threat to those in power because when people have deep, secure connections to land and community, they're harder to control and manipulate. To be clear, the fracturing of belonging isn't a byproduct of these systems, it's the point. And the insistence that identity should be singular, provable, contained within the artificial borders of white supremacy isn’t rooted in ignorance—it's strategy.
The truth is, the cartography of displacement hasn't just affected "other people." Climate change is forcing mass migration around the world. Economic, political and religious violence continues to displace communities every day. Borders shift and citizenship gets weaponized. As a result, most of us are carrying some form of spiritual homelessness, a disconnection from sacred geography that we're only beginning to understand.
But what if this moment of mass displacement and violence is offering an opportunity to redefine the question of what makes us part of a place? What if it’s giving us the chance to live in the truth that the invisible threads connecting our sense of self to the lands we’ve called home can’t be severed by bureaucratic decree? What if it’s challenging us to recognize that the multiple geographies diasporic bodies carry are rooted in sacred wisdom and the embodied knowledge of identities that were never meant to be singular?
This is where healing begins. Not in conforming to artificial categories and man-made borders, but in honoring the fullness of our identity as it relates to the land. In knowing that our identities are rooted in something far more powerful than bureaucratic decrees rooted in white supremacy. In remembering that the wisdom we carry from the lands that have ever held us can’t be erased by those who would choose to reduce us to checkboxes on their forms.
a compassionate reframe
We've been conditioned to think of identity as singular and provable—something that should fit neatly into predetermined categories created by systems that never understood the sacred relationship between people and place. This conditioning runs so deep that when someone claims multiple geographies or refuses to compress their complexity into colonial checkboxes, we often feel uncomfortable, as if their fullness somehow threatens our own fragile claim to belonging.
But the anxiety many of us feel when someone's identity spans continents, and the hostile reaction from those in power when complex identities threaten their control systems, both stem from how we've internalized the cartography of displacement, accepting that our worth should be measured by artificial borders rather than the wisdom we carry from the lands that have shaped us. We've learned to police each other's claims to place as a way of protecting ourselves within systems designed to fragment belonging.
Imagine how things might shift if we chose to believe that those who carry multiple geographies in their bodies aren't confusing anything but revealing the truth—that identity was always meant to be relational, rooted in sacred connection to land rather than bureaucratic categories? When we see someone honoring the fullness of their relationship to place, we're witnessing what it looks like to refuse the violence of cartographic reduction.
reflection prompts
In this moment of examining our relationship to land and belonging:
What places have shaped your understanding of yourself, and how do you carry their wisdom in your body even when official documents say you don't belong there?
Where do you recognize the effects of spiritual homelessness in your own life—the ways displacement (yours or your family's) has severed connections to sacred geography?
When you encounter someone whose identity spans multiple places or doesn't fit neat categories, what gets activated in you, and what might that reveal about how you've internalized artificial borders?
one final thought
When we remember that identity was always meant to be rooted in sacred relationship with land rather than colonial cartography, we stop trying to fit ourselves into artificial categories. We honor the invisible threads that connect us to the lands that have held us, trusting that the wisdom of place lives in our bodies and spirits regardless of any border drawn by those who want to contain us. This is what belonging actually is—not ownership or permission, but the sacred recognition of all the geographies that have shaped our souls.
In solidarity + gratitude,
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Really enjoyed this one, Dimple.
Soon after we moved here to NC, in a doctor’s office, I was filling out the forms and in the section for Religion the choices were: Christian, Catholic, Protestant, and Other. I burst out laughing, but it was still disturbing.