Ati Nasiah had an important message to share last week — and last night — when she spoke at several memorials paying tribute to her brother, Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, and to Ricky Best, both stabbed to death on a light-rail train in Portland on May 26.
“My brother is not a hero for acting like a decent human being,” Nasiah told a crowd of approximately 800 who gathered Sunday at the Muslim Educational Trust Community Center in Portland for an interfaith service. “I hope any of us would stand up and stand beside our fellow humans in the face of hatred. … To me, my brother is a hero because after being stabbed in the throat, his last words were to tell everyone on that train he loved them. The man who stabbed him, the victims of a hate crime, everyone.”
She re-worked her speech, which she said was written with the help of Sarah Zerina Usmen, for Taliesin’s memorial service Wednesday night in Ashland, Oregon, their hometown.
In a phone conversation before the service, Nasiah — who has lived in Juneau for the past 11 years — described growing up in Ashland as part of a large blended family, helping to raise her younger half-siblings including Taliesin.
“It was a requirement in our family, caring for the younger kids,” she said. “I watched all of them be birthed. … I changed thousands of their diapers, I rocked them to sleep.”
Nasiah said her father practiced subsistence and simplicity throughout her childhood, recalling a time when they lived without electricity or running water.
“My dad had strong spiritual and environmental and political views that I think he infused into all our hearts,” she said. “He is sort of a revolutionary spirit. … He is dedicated to creating social change, and all of his kids hold that view.”
Growing up “simple,” Nasiah said, meant they were taught to leave the lightest footprint and be change-makers.
Taliesin, she said, internalized the message.
“He had a passion for environmental justice,” Nasiah said. After Taliesin graduated from Reed College last year, he went to work for progressive consulting firm Cadmus, which works with government, nonprofit, and commercial clients in the environmental science, energy, social marketing, and policy sectors.
Nasiah said it didn’t surprise her at all that her brother made the decision to intervene and try to protect the two girls on the train, one of whom was wearing a hijab that made her the target of a hate-filled tirade by stabbing suspect Jeremy Joseph Christian.
“I hope that most people would do what he did, to see hatred and to meet it with openness and love, to be a source of support and safety,” she said.
Nasiah said she remains deeply moved by his last words, and said that being able to meet the two people who tended to her brother as he lay dying — a paramedic and fellow passenger Rachel Macy — was an immeasurable gift.
“I felt so horrified and scared imagining him being stabbed in the throat and the state of mind he might have been in that moment,” she said. “I felt like I couldn’t breathe … and then to meet these people and find out, he wasn’t scared, he was loving, and he was at peace.”
“He had these two incredible beings who loved him in those last minutes and reminded him of his true nature. They allowed him to die at peace and at ease.”
Nasiah described Taliesin’s last moments, as related to her by Macy.
“She told him he was beautiful and she said he smiled this shy smile,” she said. “And then he said, ‘Tell everyone on this train that I love them.’ That was his huge brilliant heart, his ability to see hatred and stand up. They did that for him, they did the thing that was kind and right.”
“It was huge. I’m happy that he got to have that and I’m proud that he was able to, in the face of something that would make most people shut down and be afraid, he was able to love.”
‘Message of love’
Nasiah said that she is still in shock and trying to process her grief, adding that she can’t separate the personal from the political.
“I feel so weak and so tired and that’s where I am,” she mused. “(But) understanding and processing this situation inspires me to rise up, and maybe it is in a political way, to help people of privilege unpack issues of inequity, to understand systemic inequities and the hurt that comes out of that.”
Nasiah is more qualified than most to do this work, as she has spent her post-college career working in the field of sexual assault and domestic violence prevention — she currently serves as the violence prevention and outreach director at AWARE, Juneau’s women’s shelter.
In the last two weeks, Nasiah said she has been working to share a “message of love” on both the personal and political levels, within her family dynamics and society as a whole — to say, “Open your heart bigger. Try to understand where people are coming from. To choose love, and to create systemic and institutional change.”
Nasiah, it is clear, has spent a lot of time struggling with the meaning of her brother’s violent death.
“Why did we get this huge national platform?” she asked of the enormous media interest devoted to the murder of Taliesin and Ricky Best. “Why? Because we are a white family. I don’t want to get political in the sense of division — but our system is inherently inequitable. … I am still trying to digest (this). What does this mean? How do I love? How do I help my community unpack privilege?”
In the speech that Nasiah wrote to share with the world, she said that her family has been “humbled by the abundance of support and love we have received from all of you, from all over the world.” While she noted their “unearned platform of privilege,” she said finding meaning in Taliesin’s death would involve challenging systemic and institutional inequities.
“I want to be with you, stand beside you, become allies to you. Pray for unity. For peace. For grace. For courage. For compassion. For kindness,” she said. “But I don’t just want us to pray. I want us to act.”
One opportunity for men in Alaska who want to end men’s violence, Nasiah said, is a Men Stopping Violence training June 19-21 in Juneau that is being hosted by AWARE and the Juneau Violence Prevention Coalition.
“There is real suffering today, in our community. We are all responsible, together, for the community norms that are perpetuated,” she said. “This is our world and somehow we have to figure out (how) to create greater equity. I can’t do it alone, we all have to do it together.”
At a memorial service last week at Taliesin’s alma mater, Reed College, his father told the mourners that “that at his time of death Tilly transmuted into a thousand-armed Buddha, and now he is acting through all of us.”
Referring back to her father’s words while trying to move forward, Nasiah concluded, simply, “We are the thousand-armed Buddha. It’s a collective work.”
• Contact reporter Liz Kellar at 523-2246 or liz.kellar@juneauempire.com.
These photos of Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche were shared by his sister, Juneau resident Ati Nasiah. Namkai-Meche is seen playing with Nasiah’s son last summer in Portland, and on a kayaking trip to Tracy Arm with Nasiah and their sister, Kriya. (Photo courtesy of Ati Nasiah)
These photos of Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche were shared by his sister, Juneau resident Ati Nasiah. Namkai-Meche is seen playing with Nasiah’s son last summer in Portland, and on a kayaking trip to Tracy Arm with Nasiah and their sister, Kriya. (Photo courtesy of Ati Nasiah)
