This weekend I traveled to Fort Worth to stand alongside homies and the community surrounding the Prairieland defendants at the DFW Anarchist Bookfair. Before the workshops, before browsing tables, there were people carrying the weight of state repression together. Friends and family refusing to let isolation do the state’s work for it. Being present for that mattered to me, and I’m grateful I was able to make the trip.
The gathering itself reflected much of what has become familiar within anarchist spaces: discussions on security culture, prisoner support, Palestine, social ecology, organizing, cooperation, and movement building. These are conversations I respect and recognize they have their place. Yet once again, I found myself occupying a very different space.
For many people, especially white attendees, the FUCKHOPE banner produced hesitation. Some walked by quickly. Others paused, looked confused, then kept moving. A few cautiously asked what it meant. It interrupted the rhythm of an event that, at times, felt closer to an arts market than a place where people expected to wrestle with uncomfortable ideas. Many wandered from table to table looking for shirts, patches, stickers, artwork, or something interesting to take home.
And then something happened that has happened everywhere I’ve traveled.
People of color stopped.
Not all of them agreed. Not all of them immediately understood. But they stayed.
They asked questions that weren’t meant to debate me or score political points. They wanted to understand what I meant by hope. What I meant by nihilism. Why I would say “Fuck Hope” with such certainty.
We talked about hope as one of the currencies of settler ideology—the way we’re taught to defer our lives to some future victory instead of confronting the conditions that surround us now. We talked about how organizing can become disciplined by tomorrow, always chasing the next campaign, the next administration, the next revolution, while the realities of today continue uninterrupted.
Again and again people wanted to know what Indigenous nihilism was, who else was writing about it, and where these ideas came from. I found myself giving the same honest answer: very few people, if any. If there are stars guiding this work, they are Aragorn! and Klee Benally. Beyond that, much of this project is simply trying to find language for something many of us have already lived but have rarely heard spoken aloud.
What stood out was that immediate recognition.
When I write about broken promises, about suspicion toward revolutionary optimism, about hopelessness, many people of color don’t seem to hear a provocative philosophical argument. They hear something familiar. Something they’ve already carried for years. Something they may have never had words for.
More than one person told me that certain passages stayed with them long after they walked away from the table. One person told me they couldn’t stop thinking about a passage from one of the zines. Others came back after reading just to keep talking. Not because they had finally been convinced, but because they recognized pieces of their own lives in what they had read.
The more I travel, the more I realize I’m not making these trips simply to distribute zines.
I’m traveling because these conversations matter.
I’m traveling because every city teaches me something different. Because every person who stops to ask a difficult question reminds me that this project doesn’t belong to me alone. It grows every time someone trusts me enough to tell me about the disappointments they’ve carried, the promises they’ve stopped believing, and the worlds they’ve learned to navigate without certainty.
Every person who quietly says, “I’ve felt this before, but I didn’t have words for it,” reminds me why I keep doing this.
And finally, I’m grateful to everyone in the Prairieland community who welcomed me into this space. The defendants friends, their families, and everyone continuing to organize around them are living through something no one should have to face alone. Showing up isn’t a substitute for solidarity, but it is where solidarity begins. I’m thankful I could be present, contribute in my own small way, and leave carrying not only my own thoughts, but pieces of everyone else’s.
I left Fort Worth with more questions than answers.
For me, that’s a good sign.
It means the conversations are still alive. It means this project still has somewhere to go.