Tulevazuksii

“Tulevazuksii: (Futures)” imagines ways as a karjalaine (Karelian person) to build abundant alternative futures for karjalazet (Karelian people).

Among many other specific place names, we karjalazet name our Indigenous lands Karjala (Karelia). The current international geopolitical border that separates Russia and Finland cuts its way through Karjala, splitting our peoples in two. As a poetic intervention, “Tulevazuksii” weaves together childhood memories, ancestral knowledge, and everyday acts of resurgence to reclaim one’s own karjalažus. (Karelianness, being Karelian) I invert the caricatured descriptions of karjalazet from Finnish popular imagination into a source of subversive strength for our people. I insist on the karjalažus of our language, stories, more-than-human relations, and foodways and foreground the active work needed to ensure futures where karjalažus continues to exist. “Tulevazuksii” serves as both a refusal of assimilation, forgetting ourselves, and forced transparency and a call to the continued work of futures building for karjalazet.