If You’ve Come Here To Help Me You Are Wasting Your Time

Stitched by: Zan Maeder (They/Them)

Pattern designed by: Zan Maeder (They/Them)

I created this design with Gangulu activist Lilla Watson’s powerful words to give to my mother out-law. She was doing important and challenging, grappling work to publicly bring to others attention stories of the Frontier Wars in South Australia and felt unsure about her place as a white woman to be doing so. I wanted her to have a reminder that being a white person in solidarity with First Nations resistance means a lot of grappling, sitting in discomfort and persisting in spite of all the forces inviting us to comply with white fragility and white supremacy. And as Lilla Watson reminds us, it’s not about benevolence, it’s about liberation – for all of us.