Returning through the wound: Refugeetude, memory, and relational justice
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Nathalie Lozano Neira
I was eleven years old when war entered my life in a way that could no longer be ignored.
Until then, violence existed as a distant presence, something spoken about in hushed conversations or reported on the evening news; but in 1999, in the small Colombian town of Villarrica, Tolima, violence arrived at our doorstep. An armed attack transformed the familiar landscape of my childhood into a place of fear and uncertainty. What I remember most is not a single image but a feeling, the realisation that home could suddenly become unsafe.
In the years that followed, displacement became part of my family's reality. Like millions of Colombians affected by decades of armed conflict, we learnt that sometimes movement is the only way to stay alive.
That journey carried my family thousands of kilometres from what is colonially known as Colombia in what Guna people call Abya Yala (the Americas (North, Central and South) to Vancouver, Canada, what many Indigenous communities call Turtle Island (North America). I arrived carrying the weight of survival and the hope that safety might allow us to begin again. Canada was presented to us as a refuge, a place where the violence we had fled could no longer reach us. As a child, I accepted that story without question. I was too busy learning a new language, navigating unfamiliar streets, and trying to understand who I was becoming in a place that felt both unwelcoming and strange.
What I did not know then was that our arrival was not onto empty land. We had sought refuge on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Years later, I began to understand the significance of that fact and the questions it raised.
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What did it mean to seek protection on lands whose original peoples continued to experience dispossession?
What did it mean that my family's safety was made possible within a settler state built on Indigenous displacement?
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As we learned how to "fit in", we were taught the language of the coloniser, the institutions of the coloniser, and ways of relating to land through ownership and extraction. Slowly, I began to recognise the distance between these logics and the teachings I had inherited about reciprocity, community, and living relationships with place. The refuge I found was real, but it was also entangled in histories that complicated any simple narrative of rescue.
This realisation transformed how I understood displacement, belonging, and justice. It also changed how I understood refugee resettlement. I had imagined refuge as protection from violence, instead, I learnt that arrival came tethered to debt. My mother worked three jobs, seven days a week, while I worked under the table when I could, sometimes missing school to help repay the transportation loan that brought us to Canada, a debt already gathering interest. Safety, as I understood it then, came with a price tag; protection came in exchange of labour, obligations, and the expectation that gratitude could be measured both through work and through a blind alliance to the settler state.
For years, I understood the term "refugee" as a legal category, a status granted by the state, but legal recognition never captured how displacement felt. Even after receiving permanent residency and citizenship, the rupture remained, and so did the memories, losses, and questions about home.
Vietnamese scholar Vinh Nguyen offers a concept that has helped me understand my journey in a more wholesome way: refugeetude, which understands displacement as an ongoing experience shaped by histories of violence, survival, and movement that does not end with citizenship papers or border crossings.
This framework resonates deeply with my own life. Although I no longer hold refugee status, displacement continues to shape how I understand place and belonging. I carry Villarrica with me, alongside the memories of departure and return and a complex understanding that movement is never simply personal but tied to broader histories of colonialism, war, and inequity.
Thinking through refugeetude has pushed me to see how my story is connected to larger colonial geographies across Abya Yala and Turtle Island. The conflict that displaced my family did not emerge in isolation. It was shaped by centuries of dispossession and struggles over land and resources. Likewise, my arrival in Canada unfolded within an ongoing settler colonial reality, and to recognise these connections requires moving beyond narratives that cast refugees solely as victims seeking rescue. Such stories often obscure both the conditions that produce displacement and the colonial foundations of the places where refugees are resettled.
Instead, refugeetude invites us to think relationally.
For me, relationality emerged through grassroots organising and exchanges among Indigenous women and community leaders from Abya Yala and Turtle Island. These encounters created opportunities to learn across different experiences of displacement, territorial defence, and resistance.
What struck me most was not similarity but connection.
We all come from different territories, histories and lived realities. Some have experienced forced migration, while others remained on ancestral lands under the constant threats of dispossession. Yet we shared concerns around care, memory, violence, and collective survival. These relationships revealed how solidarity is built through listening, accountability, and mutual learning.
These relationships fundamentally reshaped my understanding of refugeetude. Through Indigenous women's teachings, I came to understand displacement not simply as the act of crossing an international border or acquiring a legal refugee status, but as an ongoing condition produced through colonial dispossession, fractured relationships to land, and the continual work of rebuilding community. Refugeetude, in this sense, became less about the juridical category of the refugee and more about the relational practices that make life possible despite ongoing colonial violence. Indigenous women taught me that belonging is not secured through the recognition of the state, but through relationships of reciprocity, accountability, and collective care. These relationships revealed that solidarity is built through listening, mutual learning, and shared commitments to one another across colonially imposed borders.
Through these encounters, I also began to think differently about return.
Return is often imagined as the end of displacement, but return is rarely straightforward. Places change, people change, histories leave their mark.
When I was finally able to return to Colombia, I did not return as the same person who left. Villarrica existed both as a physical place and as a landscape of memory carried within me, so return felt less like arriving and more like entering renewed relationships with people, land, memory, and responsibility.
Return, in this sense, is not about recovering a lost past. It is about nurturing connections that displacement could not entirely sever. It is about acknowledging wounds without allowing them to define the limits of possibility.
Refugeetude then, offers a language for understanding these complexities. By emphasising relationality, it invites us to imagine forms of justice that exceed legal status and state recognition. Such justice emerges through relationships, solidarity, remembrance, and care.
My story began with violence in a small Colombian town and continued through migration, refuge, and resettlement. Like many displaced people, I continue to live between departure and return, loss and belonging, but what sustains me is the understanding that none of these journeys are undertaken alone. We carry places, memories, and relationships with us, and through them we discover new ways of remaking home.
Nathalie Lozano Neira
Nathalie is a Colombian scholar, writer, and dancer whose work explores displacement, memory, Indigenous feminisms, and decolonial solidarities across borders. Drawing from her experiences of forced migration and refugee resettlement, her research and creative practice examine the relationships between territory, belonging, relational justice, and collective memory. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies at the University of British Columbia.
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