Building Our Own Table: sahibzada mayed (صاحبزادہ مائد)

Hello {{ first name | friends}},

It’s time for another instalment in the Building Our Own Table series. I’ve enjoyed sahibzada mayed’s LinkedIn posts on decolonisation and liberation for some time, and I’m delighted to have this chance to share her work more widely. Please meet mayed …

At the present moment, I reside on the unceded, ancestral lands of the Anishinaabe people, particularly from the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa nations. I am a first-generation immigrant to the “United States”, a settler-colonial project on Turtle Island—a place that carries many names for the multitude of Indigenous peoples that have called it home for generations.

I come from a lineage of ancestors, known and yet to be known, who tended to their native lands and waters (spread across parts of South and West Asia today) as a primary form of sustenance and survival. Due to colonial violence and forced displacement, these relationships have been severed over multiple generations and cycles of loss. Unravelling the work of colonization has led me through a process of reconciliation and remembrance.

I have always existed in the chaos and the messiness, never really fitting the mold, embracing curiosity as my compass and intentionally nurturing my capacity for freedom dreaming and imagination. Some people know me as a designer or an engineer, others as an educator or a social scientist. My work embodies what it means to engage with decolonization as an everyday practice, actively confronting the ways in which colonial legacies and norms seep into our lives, relationships, and social structures. And yet, my journey with decolonization continues to emerge and remains imperfect.

Liberation Maasi's is a community space dedicated to collective healing, joy, and envisioning liberatory futures. We believe liberation is a practice—something we shape daily through our actions and relationships. Through regular gatherings and exclusive content, we create opportunities to engage with liberation as an active process and to learn from grassroots activists, artists, and cultural workers worldwide.

Last year, we created this sacred community in response to a growing need for liberatory spaces to gather, rest, and build connection.

As a member of the Liberation Maasi's community, you will be able to:

Erasure of ancestral knowledge and matriarchal wisdom: Over time, colonial legacies have delegitimized and tried to erase cultural forms of knowledge that resist the status quo and listen to the land. For many folks who come from histories of displacement and erasure, remembering their ancestral ways of being is a necessary act of survival and self-determination.

Exploitation of care work in social movements: Social activism and movement building can also reproduce dominant cultural norms rooted in burnout culture, extraction, and urgency. In many instances, community organizers are expected to constantly pour into their communities without access to sustainable support networks for themselves. Folks shaping transformative change also need gentle and nurturing spaces to experience joy, pleasure, and rest in order to replenish their work.

Inaccessibility of critical, liberatory education: Education is always political because it is deeply intertwined with narratives of power and control. There are deep-rooted inequities in being able to access spaces where people can engage deeply with liberatory ideas, build solidarity, and practice the worlds we long for. This is disproportionately heightened for folks living in the Global South.

Isolating structures that hinder effective solidarity: Social movements often end up becoming siloed as individual causes rather than being sustained as interconnected struggles; this is intentional by design. Liberation Maasi’s seeks to provide a space for folks to connect beyond the confines borders and nation-states, recognizing that liberation is collective and requires us to engage deeply with one another.

So far, the response has been relatively positive and our community has been growing at a steady pace. This has also been a profound learning experience to embody what it means to move at the pace of trust, as referenced by adrienne maree brown in her work on Emergent Strategy. I feel like we’re building this space slowly but with a lot of care and intentionality, which allows us to really show up differently and practice relational responsibility.

In the coming months, we are looking forward to expanding our membership base and extending our programming to a greater audience, particularly those facing layered forms of oppression that prevent equitable access. We are also experimenting with possibilities to host a fellowship or residency that allows us to cultivate deeper relationships and engage in playful inquiry. For this, we are hoping to build ongoing community partnerships and secure grant funding to help us bring these ideas to life.

I understand racism as one of the core features of a system built on dehumanization and extraction, connected to a larger network of oppressive structures built through colonial and imperial legacies. Looking ahead, I really hope to see a seismic shift in how we collectively approach anti-racism work, moving beyond surface-level reforms to truly dismantle the foundations and roots of supremacy. I believe this work begins with reconnecting with the earth and remembering what it means to practice responsible stewardship.

I feel inspired after that interview, don’t you? Please connect with mayed and support this important work on her website and LinkedIn, and you can find other places to connect on her bio site.

Thanks for reading,

Sharon

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© Sharon Hurley Hall, 2025. All Rights Reserved.

I am an anti-racism educator and activist, the author of “I’m Tired of Racism”, and co-host of The Introvert Sisters podcast. This newsletter is published on beehiiv (affiliate link).