Author: Karina Vilca (Emslie)

Travelling from Aberdeen to Knoydart feels like both an adventure and a return home. For me, it is also a way to accompany the voices of Torry — a community in Aberdeen that fights hard to defend its land, its stories, and its future. Together we carry those voices north, from the grey city shaped by fishing and oil to the “rough bounds” of Knoydart, where other stories of land, loss, and resilience continue to live. We drive across the Highlands to Mallaig, where we meet the walkers arriving from Skye. The ferry crossing becomes another point of celebration — flags raised, laughter carried by the salt air. When we land in Knoydart the sun is still high, spilling light across the sea and hills. We pitch our tents in the Knoydart campsite, while others cook in the community kitchen. Everything feels voluntary, shared, unspoken — a rhythm of generosity that carries through the weekend.

Fire Stories and A Play for Torry

That evening the hall fills with voices. After a delicious venison stew with rice, beans, and potatoes, Fire Stories opens with the Red Flag Players, carrying forward the spirit of the Craigallian Fire — the Depression-era campfire near Milngavie where workers, walkers, and radicals once gathered to share visions of justice, a flame remembered by the words: “May the fire always be lit.”

Then comes A Play for Torry — stitched from the voices, poetry, and songs of residents. It is not simply performance but participatory theatre, applying the principles of Theatre of the Oppressed: residents as protagonists, speaking their own truths, opening space for dialogue, resistance, and imagination. It tells of fishing boats gone, of Old Torry demolished in the 1970s to make way for oil expansion, of crumbling RAAC housing, and of today’s fight to protect St. Fittick’s Park, the community’s last green space, threatened by the so-called Energy Transition Zone. Sharp, funny, furious, and true — it is a reminder that Torry, like Skye, refuses erasure.

The evening closes with music at the community-owned bar, The Old Forge — stories and songs woven together, the place echoing with the warmth of shared memory.

The Just Walk Assembly at Knoydart

The next day, the assembly opens not with speeches, but with song. From the Singing for Justice on Land and Sea songbook, created by a group of young people with the Landworkers’ Alliance, we sing together:

The drawings by Skye, one of the young people on the walk, carry grief but also a call to courage

Her art reminds us that folk music is not only heritage, but a living practice of resistance and remembrance: to be sung around fires, in classrooms, on marches — wherever people need to hold one another through struggle.
From there, voices from many lands weave their stories together:
From Knoydart, where families were cleared in the 19th century and where land returned to community ownership in 1999.
From the Isle of Skye, where crofting communities still fight to buy back ancestral land lost to lairds and estates.
From Torry, where the last green space faces enclosure.
From Canada, spoken by our Canadian friend Wapat.

Wapat carries his family’s history in tattoos — a spider marking ancestral roots. He tells us how, in his tradition, names and places are bound together: names are stewardship. His name is linked to the horizontal and longitudinal — lines that guide across land and sky. Not abstract coordinates, but directions for living: ways of orienting, weaving kinship, story, and responsibility into place. His name, like the tattoos he bears, is a map.

But his story also carried the weight of erasure. In what is now Canada, the arrival of Europeans brought waves of smallpox epidemics that devastated Indigenous nations. Among the Haida, population collapsed from around 10,000 to just 600 survivors by 1881【Maclean’s 2018】. The Plains Cree, Blackfoot, and Assiniboine were struck so severely in the late 18th century that entire communities were wiped out【BBC 2018】. Across the continent, historians estimate that up to 90% of Indigenous peoples died from introduced diseases, starvation, and displacement.

What disease began, colonial policy deepened. Under the government of John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first Prime Minister, the residential school system was created. More than 150,000 Indigenous children were taken from their families, many never returning. The motto of the schools was chillingly clear: “Kill the Indian in the child, save the man.” This was an attempt not only to erase people from the land, but to take the land out of the heart.

And yet, culture endures. Wapat’s spider tattoo shows that survival is not passive — it is active, woven with intention. The lines inked on his skin are like strands of grass: each thread may seem fragile, but when braided together they hold. His tattoos map his family’s survival, their refusal to be erased, their insistence that identity and place remain bound together.

Here the web of history tightened. Many of those cleared from Knoydart and the Highlands were shipped across the Atlantic. They carried the grief of displacement, but also became settlers who displaced others. The strings of empire linked Knoydart’s empty glens to the lands of the Haida, Cree, and Blackfoot, binding Scottish trauma to Indigenous genocide in Canada.

Silence followed his story. Grief arrived differently to each of us. In my heart I saw the campesinos I grew up with: barefoot children beside their mothers working the soil, families who lived high in the mountains to escape erasure and endure harsh winters. Many still die in my parents’ lands. Their suffering under Spanish colonisation felt so close to Wapat’s story.

I offered my tears — salt and water — for his courage, and for the ancestors of my Andean people who also died, yet still live in our culture. In that silence, I recognised my own name: Vilca, tied to the sacred plant Wilka and to the river Vilcanota in the Andes. A name that binds me to both land and lineage. Like Wapat, my name is not just a sound but a thread: a reminder of stewardship, a strand in the braid, a responsibility carried forward.

And in that silence, the Andes and the river Vilcanota whispered: “We are here in the waters of the North Sea. When you touch sea and land, we are here with you too.”

As if listening to that thought, one of the Knoydart residents spoke of a recent visit to Scotland by leaders of the Wampís Nation of the Peruvian Amazon. Their journey wove new connections — meeting people on the Isle of Skye, in Torry, in St Andrews, and standing at the Scottish Parliament.

The Andes, like Knoydart, like Canada — which was colonised in part by settlers from Europe— carry deep scars of conquest. Intergenerational trauma moves like a cycle that repeats: in Peru, millions of Indigenous people died after Spanish invasion through smallpox, forced labour, and famine. Yet culture endures — in Quechua words, in music, in the memory of rivers.

In 2015 the Wampís declared the creation of their Autonomous Territorial Government (GTANW), reclaiming self-government over more than 1.3 million hectares of Amazon forest. In 2025, their leaders — Pamuk Teófilo Kukush Pati and Tsanim Evaristo Wajai Asamat — came to Scotland to warn that the global rush for renewable energy is once again threatening their forests, rivers, and lives, through illegal balsa logging for wind turbines. At Parliament, their message was clear: “Do not invest in companies destroying our lands. Instead, invest in our projects, which feed our people and protect the forest.”

They also spoke in solidarity. Having just learned of the struggles on the Isle of Skye, they added their voices in support of its people. They expressed the same for Torry: noting that although they cannot send Wampís warriors to defend St. Fittick’s Park, their hearts are with Torry in a web of solidarity — a spider’s weave of connection stretched across continents.

Their philosophy of Tarimat Pujut — living well in harmony with nature — carried into our circle in Knoydart. It reminded us that colonisation is not the end, and that the work of remembering, resisting, and re-rooting belongs to all of us.

Erasure and Transition: A Web of Grief

In the walking assembly, Gaza is present — in our conversations, and in the flag carried by walkers from the Isle of Skye as the path carves its steps towards Glasgow. Gaza is a place where homes are erased in real time, families uprooted in a single night, entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble. The echoes are sharp: the same logic of clearance, enclosure, and silence repeated across centuries and continents.

That grief also belongs to Scotland. The Highland Clearances left scars across the land: Assynt, Skye, Sutherland, Knoydart. In Knoydart the clearance was brutally “successful” — none of the original families remain, their descendants scattered by force. The grief of genocide, of being deleted from place, still lingers in the glens. And yet the land remembers: in 1999 Knoydart was bought back into community hands, joining Assynt (1992) and Eigg (1997) as part of Scotland’s long struggle for land reform. These reversals show that history is not fixed. What is violently taken can, through collective struggle, be reclaimed.

But the story does not end there. Many of those cleared from Knoydart and the Highlands were forced abroad, and some became settlers in Canada. There, they found land by taking it from others — displacing Indigenous nations and enforcing new forms of erasure. John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first Prime Minister, entrenched this violence through residential schools and forced removals. The links are stark: those displaced from Scotland became agents of displacement elsewhere, binding Knoydart to Canada in the web of empire.

At the local level, the same struggle is alive in Torry. A community shaped by fishing and oil is once again being asked to give up land in the name of “progress” — as Scotland pledges to reach net zero by 2045. For Torry, the promise of a “just transition” is poignant but painful. Their last green space, St. Fittick’s Park, faces enclosure by the so-called Energy Transition Zone. The risk is clear: that transition without justice becomes just another erasure.

And in Aberdeen, another thread of displacement is unfolding in real time: people seeking asylum. Protests rise, hostility spreads, and those who fled wars and persecution now face fresh threats in the very place they sought safety【BBC, 2025】. They too carry the threads of their homelands while trying to root themselves in new soil. They too are part of the living web we spoke of in Knoydart.

Each of us in Scotland is called to respond: to choose our attitude, our behaviour, to decide what kind of ancestor we will be for our children, and for the children of our children.

Are we not all part of a web of strings, where each action — no matter how small — ripples in ways we cannot yet see?

The sea of Knoydart is calm that evening, the mountains casting long shadows. In my heart I feel the weight of choice — how each of us carries power, not only over those we love but even over those we call “outsiders” or “enemies.” Our decisions ripple outward, shaping futures.

I think of John A. Macdonald, his policies shaping the fate of nations. We too hold that responsibility: to act, to resist, to remain soft-hearted enough to carry hope and heal as we pass through the world. Like rivers crossing valleys to reach the sea, our actions connect us all.

And as we remember Gaza — its families displaced, its homes destroyed — the web becomes clearer: the threads of erasure, yet also the threads of resistance, stitching grief into solidarity, and pointing us towards renewal.

The Continuation of Ripples

More reflections take place, and perhaps the ripple effects of the land, of the Just Walk, are still taking shape in each heart that is present at the assembly. The walk itself is a moving river, carving new paths as it continues.

Questions are asked, and more questions follow. That is the beauty of the assembly: not answers fixed in stone, but circles of thought that open, deepen, and return. The path is still unfolding. The walkers are moving now toward Glenfinnan, carrying these conversations further, carrying us all in their steps.

I look forward to what comes next — to hearing the stories that rise, to seeing how the ripples spread, and to discovering what kind of ancestors we choose to be.

Homing, Stewardship, and Ayni

In the end, all these stories of land justice — Torry, Knoydart, Skye, Gaza, Canada, Peru, Aberdeen — seem to circle back to the question: what does it mean to make home?

To “land” is not to own but to enter into reciprocity with place — with rivers, mountains, animals, and all beings. In Quechua, the word ayllu means both kinship group and territory: family and land are inseparable, for us Andean people to belong is to be woven into these relations.

In Quechua we call this ayni: sacred reciprocity, the balance of giving and receiving, the recognition that nothing thrives alone. It is an obligation, a principle that governs everything from irrigation systems to ritual exchanges. When applied to land, ayni insists that home is never possession — it is relation, care, and balance.

Knoydart reminds us that resistance itself is a form of culture. Fire stories, theatre, assemblies, and silence are how we keep memory alive, how we refuse erasure, how we continue to make home even when land is taken.

From Torry to Knoydart to Skye — and echoing in Gaza, Canada, Peru, and in the journeys of asylum seekers — the lesson is clear: history is not inevitable, but reversible. Communities can reclaim, retell, re-root ( Kenrick ,2011) And in doing so, they remind us that we are not only walking on land — we are walking with it.

Our names — our acts — are not just words but maps, guardianships, and braids of stewardship. They remind us that we are all like migratory birds, crossing timelines and geographies. To live well is not to own the land, but to belong to it — to dive in and out, to follow the air, to touch the land with respect, to drink the water, and to feel its warmth and its seasons.

Resources

Justin Kenrick (2011) – Scottish Land Reform and Indigenous Peoples’ Rights: Self-Determination and Historical Reversibility.
Friends of the Earth Scotland (2025) – “Amazonian leaders call on Scottish Parliament to end illegal logging links with wind farm.” foe.scot
The Edinburgh Reporter (2025) – “Whitfield meets with Indigenous Wampís leaders” (July 2025). edinburghreporter.co.uk
Grassroots to Global (2025) – “Land Justice event on Eigg.” grassroots2global.org
Connected Aberdeen (2025) – A Play for Torry. connectedaberdeen.org
BBC News (2025) – “Aberdeen asylum protests: Hundreds march through city centre.” bbc.co.uk
BBC News (2018) – “Canada’s residential school system: the children who never came home.” bbc.com
Maclean’s Magazine (2018) – “How a smallpox epidemic forged modern British Columbia.” macleans.ca
Ontario Legislature (2025) – “Statue of Sir John A. Macdonald uncovered at Queen’s Park.” ola.org
Landworkers’ Alliance (2025) – Singing for Justice on Land and Sea songbook (includes drawings Spinning out of Time by Skye). landworkersalliance.org
BBC News (2023) – “Isle of Skye housing crisis: Second homes and local struggle.”bbc.co.uk

Migration, Resistance, and the Web of Connections across places