There’s a quiet danger in the way movements can start to orbit around a single voice.
It often begins with good intentions — a person brave enough to speak, to name what others won’t, to make unseen truths visible. But slowly, without meaning to, the circle closes. The voice that once echoed a collective experience becomes the experience.
And that’s when representation turns into performance.
The Illusion of Representation
Representation can look like progress.
It can sound like justice.
But when it’s built around a single figurehead, it’s often just a reshaped version of the same systems we say we’re dismantling.
When one person is treated as the Indigenous voice, the woman’s perspective, the activist for an entire community, we stop listening to the nuanced realities that actually define those communities. We trade reciprocity for hierarchy. And that’s not representation — it’s replication of colonial structure wearing a cultural veneer.
The Cost of Controlled Narratives
When one person controls the story, even with the best of intentions, the rest of the voices start to fade.
The storytellers become cautious. The brave ones go quiet. The collective energy turns into competition instead of connection.
It’s not always malicious. Sometimes it’s the unspoken reward systems at play — the funding that favors the loudest, the media that chases the most “marketable,” the institutions that pick a spokesperson so they don’t have to sit in the messiness of many truths.
But harm doesn’t need bad intent to take root.
Silencing can happen in the gaps — when we don’t make space for those whose stories don’t fit neatly into what’s already been decided is “the narrative.”
Recognizing When “Representation” Becomes Tokenism
If you’re organizing panels, events, or partnerships, it’s worth asking yourself:
Are you inviting a person because of their lived experience and what they uniquely bring to the conversation — or because their presence helps check a box?
Here’s the difference:
-
Representation creates relationship and context.
-
Tokenism creates optics and comfort.
If the same Native person is being invited again and again — while others from the community are overlooked — that’s not representation. That’s consolidation of narrative.
It’s an easy trap to fall into, especially when one person has already been elevated in the public eye. But real allyship asks more of us. It asks for curiosity, for deeper connection, for doing the slower work of relationship rather than the fast work of visibility.
Before sending that invite, pause and ask:
-
Who else’s voices haven’t been heard yet?
-
Who might feel unseen because we keep centering the same person?
-
Am I inviting for the person, or am I inviting for the picture?
Representation without relationship is just marketing.
When One Person Forces Themselves Into the Room
Sometimes it’s not the organizers choosing — it’s the person who’s learned to claim every mic.
That can feel complicated, especially when they hold positional power or visibility.
If that happens, it’s okay to set boundaries that honor the collective, not just the individual.
You can:
-
Clarify the purpose of the event and the need for diverse perspectives.
-
Be transparent about your intent to highlight multiple community voices.
-
Invite others alongside them to rebalance the conversation.
-
Hold firm if they try to frame their exclusion as disrespect — because honoring a community means making room for the many, not catering to the few.
There’s courage in protecting space for plurality.
And there’s humility in knowing that one voice, no matter how experienced or well-meaning, can’t carry the full truth of a people.
What Lateral Violence Looks Like
Lateral violence often disguises itself as “accountability” or “protecting the movement.”
It’s what happens when hurt people start to police one another instead of the systems that created the hurt.
It can sound like:
“She’s not Native enough.”
“He’s too traditional.”
“They don’t speak for us.”
These fractures aren’t new. They’re the byproduct of colonization — an old wound that keeps reopening every time we confuse control with leadership, every time we mistake personal visibility for collective liberation.
Reclaiming Relational Leadership
True leadership in Indigenous and community-centered spaces isn’t about being the voice. It’s about building circles where many voices can rise together.
It’s about humility over hierarchy.
It’s about knowing when to speak and when to pass the mic.
Relational leadership doesn’t hoard attention. It nurtures trust. It welcomes contradiction. It understands that power shared is not power lost.
If we want movements that heal rather than harm, we have to remember that leadership isn’t ownership — it’s stewardship.
The Call Back to Community
The work ahead isn’t about dismantling individuals. It’s about remembering our collective roots.
It’s about noticing when advocacy starts to mirror the systems it meant to challenge — and choosing another way.
A way that looks like reciprocity instead of rivalry.
Like listening instead of lecturing.
Like shared humanity over personal brand.
If we can return to that, maybe representation can finally mean what it was always supposed to mean — many stories, woven together, forming something stronger than any single voice could carry alone.