Some of what I have read, heard and has come through during this month.
I will start with the most profound and succinct thing that has been underscored this month:
The lie of individual blame, the centrality of value in the journey of decolonising and re-indigenising, and the importance of honesty in the spaces we create and inhabit for healing.
How this has come about:
Some medicine
One of the songs that came through one morning in my ancestral time was “brother I’m in pain, sister I’m in pain, grandpa, I’m in pain, warrior I’m in pain, maiden I’m in pain, grandma I’m in pain, plant guides I’m in pain, animals I’m in pain.”
The body does not lie
Some reads
https://emergencemagazine.org/story/corn-tastes-better/
I finally got round to reading this long and deliciously full article by Robin Wall Kimmerer on maize, and the exploration of two different worlds maize has been born through and been inserted into: indigenous breeding and reciprocal relationship with maize, and industrial agribusiness modifications and objectifying extractive view of maize. The tendency in modern world would be to look down upon the first of these. I appreciated that Kimmerer distinguishes these two paradigms as high TEK and high tech. TEK meaning traditional ecological knowledge.
In conversation with a collaborator I extended the ‘e’ in TEK to mean all the ways in which we home-make on this planet with all our Earth relations, our community. “Eco” comes from “oikos” in Greek and relates to home (it’s also the eco in economy – managing one’s home). I am enjoying playing around with “high TEK” as a concept as I refine the offering of a year-long regenerative life learning programme that is Rejea.
https://hehiale.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/we-live-in-the-future-come-join-us/
I’ve been thinking about time, decolonising time, African notions of time, and the notion of futures. A powerful line from this beautiful essay unpacking indigenous futurities: “they are the ones who want us to only be living in the past, so that their pain can end. But we don’t carry only pain, we carry connection.”
https://liberationschool.org/from-allies-to-comrades/
This was shared by a collaborator with whom I co-moderated a discussion following a film screening of “Water to Dust”. I was interested in exploring solidarity and barriers to solidarity such as perspectives of people as lacking, and of places as being too far. The article has good provocations on how to move towards what we truly want in our movements and in solidarity: collaboration, accountability, joy, etc. That is, a committed, reflective, compassionate, growing relationality as opposed to lines drawn in the sand.
https://intercontinentalcry.org/everyday-acts-resurgence-people-places-practices/
I am trying to access some of the chapters from this edited volume. The introduction is available online however as is the opening poem. In my research I began to look at practices as fertile theory-in-action spaces. The body, women, and women’s embodied work was for a long time left out of or hidden in academic writing – and I wanted to access this, and to reclaim it as philosophy and theory enacted.
Some listening
https://forthewild.world/listen/robin-wall-kimmerer-on-indigenous-knowledge-for-earth-healing
In this podcast episode, Robin Wall Kimmerer opens with a telling of the Algonquin & Iroquios origin story. It is profound and moved me in deep places. It made me also consider the ways in which origin stories of African nations (communities) are different and what they highlight. The sentence that resonated most was “in her great gratitude, skywoman began to dance”
https://collectivetraumasummit.com/play/?inf_contact_key=0644ca9300e7748af3ef9af075e6d6e3f651f238aa2edbb9c8b7cff03e0b16a0
although this is likely not available online for free now unless you pay to listen to it. In this conversation with Pat McCabe, she underscored for me the importance of healing the shame, wounds, and trauma of colonisation. Or as someone at the Ecoversities Africa Gathering called it, the “metaphysical confusion” that we on this continent are bearing.
She says, “if these people [indigenous/colonisation survivors] are holding the deep understanding of millenia of how to be on this Earth, and they are in this confusion and fear and disruption, that’s not just an us [indigenous people] problem, that’s a humanity problem. That’s a five-fingered ones problem.”
This talk was stellar and clear. Taiaiake sharpened my understanding and articulation of indigenous resurgence, and again, the necessity of healing. In movement building as I have learnt it through Ayni Institute, there is the idea of movement ecology, a way of articulating how we are together in movement and how we can collaborate rather than compete. Movement ecology defines three main ways of making change: personal transformation, building alternative institutions, and challenging/changing dominant institutions. In this talk, Taiaiake, describes the indigenous resurgence movement in Canada starting at dominant institutions and getting to building alternative institutions, and then realising the deep need for personal transformation work, i.e. work to heal and reclaim indigenous ways of being as people, and with the land.
Talk to me