Hearing the Root: Indigenous Revolutionary Spiritualities from Kashmir to Iowa
by Diya Abbas
August 28, 2026
Image courtesy of the author.
From field to field, my mother and I immigrated from Pakistan to Iowa, where I heard the same rattle and thrum of the dholki in the powwow: a language of drums shared between the cosmic and astral ancestry of the Meskwaki and Sauk tribes. From one field to another, my family was displaced from Kashmir to Amritsar to Peshawar to Islamabad to Lahore to America. As a single parent, we moved from small town to small town in Iowa every four to six months, and later to towns in Kansas and Missouri. Having lived across one of the most densely populated indigenous populations in this country, growing up visiting reservations, being raised by elders who would look after me when my mom was at work, through my reversion to Islam I realized that the “ru,” or soul, I heard growing up in Islamic spirituality was nourished alongside the indigenous spiritualities of the Midwest. Through Sufism, I discovered how rituals could strengthen my relationship with the cosmos, a desire to communicate with a pre-diasporic sense of home, a root through which spirituality's ability to imagine other ways of being catalyzes revolutionary thinking. Here I found the rattle of the root in the parallel lines between Islamic consciousness and the 14,000-year-old indigenous practices which laid the scaffolding of sentience for the North American soil we managed to build home on with solar, sonic, and sacred potentiality.
The ability of the double-sided barrel with an animal’s skin draped on both its sides to drum anthems of the people calls forward alternative political arrangements, making the unbearable project of surviving, sustainable, and perhaps sacred in the syncopated solace of the drum’s rattle and thrum. The drum is the heartbeat of revolutionary roots across the globe, from the tambor to the tabla; its echoes rattle these movements of justice. Despite dislocation, despite distance, this heartbeat remains the same. It is said that in the 1870s, a young woman of the Lakota Sioux was given a large drum filled with spiritual power and in her vision she was told this drum would have the capacity to bring blessings and peace to all Natives.¹ Back home, Qawwali, a form of devotional Sufi music, relies primarily on percussion and the lyrical ecstasy of vocal oscillations with the divine. Qawwali lyrics are always about the Beloved, who through song becomes a form of incantation. Similarly for Muslims in South Asia and for Natives in the Americas, “...the dance and songs are considered to be forms of prayer and are embedded in a rigorous code of ethics and respect.”² More than just a percussion instrument, the dhol, or for Kashmiris the tumbaknari made from terracotta and goat skin, and for Natives the powwow, hand, or water drum, function as the heartbeat of Indian identity and spirituality where “nothing can function without the heartbeat…”³
The first time I took a standardized school test in the U.S., I remember seeing “Indian” in the racial identification section at the beginning of the pamphlet. I circled it, thinking that if “Pakistani” wasn’t an option, then “Indian” was a close second. Deficient in the racial logic of the States, my mistake was incorrect. I know now I could claim a different sense of identity in this drum, which could identify the beginning of each new journey, each new state, with a “traveling song.”⁴ The drum offers a mode of identification transcending the verbicide of categories. Qawwali is one of the few spiritual devices that maintained its integrity in the spiritual, genocidal, and geological fratricide of the partition of the South Asian continent in 1947, surviving the largest mass migration in human history. The dargah and the mehfil, like the powwow, is a gathering of what Erniste Cody of the White Mountain Apache says is used “to re-identify ourselves with who we are and what we have lost. It is a cry for what was ours, what is still ours. A powwow is something that can pull out the meaning of that Native self.”⁵
Meaning could only be made horizontally, as a child walking the repetitive fields of each new town in Iowa. I tried to find something to hold onto: an abandoned train I’d hide in for hours, a matrix of corn I’d purposefully get lost in, staring into a field which seemed never-ending. Looking back, I’m not sure how I found my way back, or survived the wayward glances of farmers unsure where I came from. I believe now that this was because of the root which distinguished the common land from the field. Marx, in his analysis of primitive accumulation in Capital, writes of the “common land”: the violent expropriation of the peasant population’s land by allocating acres of arable land to the ruling class, creating the foundation for modern-day capitalism.⁶ What distinguishes the field from this common land is that the field is inherently unprofitable; it is the grid that remains after the till; it is the yet-to-be-discovered in a horizontal (home)land actively inventing, recovering, and resurrecting itself from colonial plunder through spiritual technologies.
I remember the daily five prayers I’d watch my grandmother, Ammi Jaan, make and when I’d pray with her, her oversized headscarf tunneling my view of the prayer mat; I knelt on this field. My head between my hands, it was the field under my mat, under the concrete, in the soil which witnessed and held the root, the heartbeat. The call of this root and its arrival, like duende, “means a radical change in forms.”⁷ I wasn’t supposed to be here and yet, the field spoke back with a fugitive spirit more than I knew and can know now. In the self-effacing gesture of prayer, something changed and the possibility of home turned into a birthing ground for communication with “what sustains us…the land we have not touched/the primal temple”⁸ in this field, the Ioway (Páxoje) call tanji: "prairie."⁹
Walking the tanji for hours under what the Ioway call the “great dome of the Sky,”¹⁰ I was protected. Later in my reversion to Islam, I was found by the scholar Ibn-Kathir, who explicitly uses the analogy of a “dome-like canopy” over the earth in the word “maḥfūẓan.”¹¹ Looking up, it was the great field of the sky that protected Ammi Jaan and me when a tornado came through Ottumwa, destroying the apple tree outside of the retirement home we lived in. The Ioway call tornadoes “t'at'anwe,” “The Finger of God.”¹² When the storm came, Ammi Jaan and I did not know we were supposed to evacuate to the basement, and so I watched God lay the palm of her hand on the cheek of our field, slowly, missing our apartment by only a few hundred feet.
On my walks, Ammi Jaan would warn me not to be out too late as the jinns, who in the Quran are said to have been made by a smokeless flame of fire, lurk under trees at night. Sitting underneath a tree could increase your chances of getting possessed.¹³ I know now that not all jinns are bad spirits like the “Little People of the Woods,” of which there are several kinds. Seeking the patronage of these spirits, their guidance and benevolence, is too a form of communicating with the misunderstood supernatural forces of the Divine. Queerness and Islam are seen often as opposing worlds, while in my reversion, I now see the two actively reinforcing each other in a spiral staircase to the unknown. Like a Two-Spirit person, a transient being is capable of moving between genders, being both neither and both. Here in New York, sometimes I am called Sir, sometimes Ma’am. I feel a bit like a trickster, taking on forms based on what the viewer chooses to see. The trickster figure for the Iowa is Ishkinki, who envelops both Rabbit and Coyote.¹⁴ In my own practice, I am drawn to the mythical beasts and creatures in Islam in Qazwini Zakariya Ibn Muhammad’s book “The Wonder of Creatures and the Marvels of Creation”: ʻAjāʼib al-makhlūqāt. There is the beast–the coming together of human and non-human, similar to the coming together of creature and creator. What are the possibilities of vesseling our lives as both?
From Kashmir to Iowa, the ability of creation myths to embody both a personal and political “other” is evident in the long history of protests and demonstrations for independence and sovereignty. To imagine otherwise, a version of our fields with self-determination, basic civil services, the right to communication, freedom of expression, and autonomy constitutes the basic acts of autonomous creation. In 2019, Article 370 was reversed, revoking Kashmir’s indigenous rights following mass arrests of nearly 4,000 people, communication blackouts, and at least 500 protest marches, with more than half a million armed Indian troops deployed over the past 30 years, making Kashmir the most militarized zone in the world.
Protests happening today in 2026 mark the demand of “Haq-i-Malikiyat, Haq-i-Hukmarani” (Right to Ownership, Right to Governance): the right to resources including the abolishment of the 12 refugee assembly seats in the AJK Assembly which dilute votive power of natives, a demand that Kashmiri nationalists such as the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front have demanded since the 1980s, in addition to Kashmir’s complete independence and reunification as a sovereign state free from control by both India and Pakistan.¹⁵ The tradition of protest led by Natives in the US serves as a model for the possibilities of land reclamation, from the Land Back movement, to the Meskwaki Land Reclamation of 1857, and the removal of symbols such as the 2020 takedown of the long-standing Andrew Jackson statue which once stood in front of the White House.
Despite partitions and displacements, natives form a solidarity between this similar paradox of home in homelessness, through the activation of a sacred geography. Where, despite the borders and tramline’s furrowing boundaries between what is and what isn’t, despite the spiritual co-option of claiming native inheritance with blood quantums and the co-option of Sufism through trendy, hippie transcendence, a root remains. Unified through bìilukaa, which Wendy Red Star from Crow Reservation describes, “bìilukaa implie(s) not only common heritable ancestry but, more importantly, a community bound by language, spiritual beliefs, and social structures.”¹⁶ My relationship with the US is not as a member but as a mirror.
Kinship systems for both natives and non-natives reside in the power of the community. The authority of a story and of the word is reported by the Ioway through the seven clans (Black Bear, Buffalo, Thunder/Eagle, Wolf, Elk, Pigeon, Owl), where each family carries specific obligations under which nobody is left without a role.¹⁷ Paralleling this extension of family lines, in Islam Muslims greet all united in faith as bhai, brother, or bahan, sister, forming networks of spiritual solidarity. The divinity of the number seven in clan structure also shows up in the Ioway’s seven cardinal directions of the Above, the Below, East, South, West, North, and the Center, each having its own Deity Protector: Wakanda Wawa'in.¹⁸ I am reminded of Ibn-Khaldum’s cyclical theory of justice that suggests “assabiyya,” a concept of social solidarity in collective consciousness, to be the social cohesion or the Center between the six rotating cycles of history: seven total moving parts.¹⁹
Solidarity through global indigenous orientations with space and time appears in the acknowledgement and worship of Oneness or The Creator. Both Muslims and the Ioway call upon “the Creator” as the ultimate authority of the natural and supernatural world in Ma^u²⁰ and Al-Khaliq. Both believe water to be the only thing that existed before human creation. The Otoe-Missouria tribe writes, “nothing existed at the beginning, except an abundance of water. It flowed everywhere, eventually pushing all life out of it.” The cultivation of creation through water shows itself in Surah Al-Anbiya (21:30). “And We made from water every living thing.” In the Midwest, it was by lakes and rivers that I would return when loneliness took over my life. It was there that water, being the origin of life, reminded me of this sacred activation of the solidarity between all living things, including the water, the trees of oneness (shajarat al-aḥadiyya), and even the aliveness of the language of birds (manṭiq al-ṭayr). The shared spirit, ru, or Wakanda of the Divine, whose revolutionary heartbeat ached despite displacement, despite a lack of language; it was the hidden animacy of the divine which revealed the original and authentic rhythm of home from Kashmir to Iowa.
End Notes
¹ Harvard Pluralism Project. “The Powwow: Sacred and Secular Meet,” n.d. https://pluralism.org/the-powwow-sacred-and-secular-meet.
² Ibn.
³ Associated Press. “Native Americans in Upper Midwest Protect Their Drumming Tradition.” Voice of America, July 23, 2024. https://www.voanews.com/a/native-americans-in-upper-midwest-protect-their-drumming-tradition-/7709434.html.
⁴ Ibn.
⁵ Open Horizons. “The Powwow: Dancing, Singing, Drumming, and Socializing,” n.d. https://www.openhorizons.org/the-powwow-dancing-singing-drumming-and-socializing.html.
⁶ Marx, Karl. “A Critique of Political Economy.” In Capital, 63–77, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822390169-009.
⁷ Oelker, Dieter. “Juego Y Teoría Del Duende, De Federico García Lorca.” Acta Literaria 7, no. 23 (January 1, 1998): 31–42. https://doi.org/10.1128/mra.01263-18.
⁸ Mackey, Nathaniel. “Limbo, Dislocation, Phantom Limb: Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Occasion.” Human Biology, August 15, 2012. https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=15762&context=criticism.
⁹ “Tanji Na Che: Recovering the Landscape of the Ioway, by Lance Foster,” n.d. https://ioway.nativeweb.org/iowaylibrary/tanji.htm.
¹⁰ Ibn
¹¹ WikiIslam. “Islamic Views on the Shape of the Earth,” n.d. https://wikiislam.net/wiki/Islamic_Views_on_the_Shape_of_the_Earth.
¹² “Tanji Na Che: Recovering the Landscape of the Ioway, by Lance Foster,” n.d. https://ioway.nativeweb.org/iowaylibrary/tanji.htm.
¹³ Kelsey, Ian. “Jinn Superstitions | Dartmouth Folklore Archive,” November 18, 2016. https://journeys.dartmouth.edu/folklorearchive/2016/11/18/jinn-superstitions/.
¹⁴ “Beliefs,” n.d. https://ioway.nativeweb.org/culture/beliefs.htm.
¹⁵ Rashid, Hashim Bin. “From the Other Side of the Line — Jamhoor.” Jamhoor, August 1, 2026. https://www.jamhoor.org/read/from-the-other-side-of-the-line.
¹⁶ Wendy Red Star: Bíilukaa. Radius Books, 2023.
¹⁷ “Ioway Clans,” n.d. https://ioway.nativeweb.org/culture/clans.htm.
¹⁸ Ibn.
¹⁹ Murat Önder and Fatih Ulaşan, “IBN KHALDUN’S CYCLICAL THEORY ON THE RISE AND FALL OF SOVEREIGN POWERS: THE CASE OF OTTOMAN EMPIRE,” ADAM AKADEMİ Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi 8, no. 2 (December 20, 2018): 231–66, https://doi.org/10.31679/adamakademi.453944.
²⁰ “Ioway Cultural Institute - Student Resources,” n.d. https://ioway.nativeweb.org/student.htm.
Diya Abbas is a first-generation Butch Pakistani writer from the Midwest. Her poems and essays can be found in Poetry Daily, Sinister Wisdom, Adroit, North American Review, Michigan Quarterly and others. Diya is an alumni of First Wave, the only full tuition hip-hop scholarship in the world, and is currently a Masters student at NYU’s Arts Politics program. She believes the poem is a clock. The poem makes time. Find more of her muses at diyabbas.com