Indigenous emcee Sista Hailstorm graced the stage during the morning session. She described women as “the womb, the power, [and] the strength,” a power needed to affect the kind of structural and spiritual change that our communities so desperately need. She called for us to honor our ancestral legacies of struggle to get to a place of healing. In celebrating our influence as women to alter realities and envision new possibilities, Hailstorm reminds us that our struggles across communities should never be compared and that we need to bridge our shared oppressions to affect change. “It’s not about a victimization marathon,” says Hailstorm, challenging the stale model of oppression olympics in organizing. “We need to retrain our minds, bodies and spirits.” Communities of sound are spaces for this kind of sacred healing, like Seattle’s vibrant hip hop scene represented by organizations like 206 Zulu (which Hailstorm represents) and the efforts to build ‘convivencia’ by the Seattle Fandango Project. Hailstorm embodied the essence of what WWR is all about – making scenes and building communities.

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