Quote:"To understand the storying of any place, I must also understand the storying of myself. Must follow traces beneath familiar surfaces to where ancestral structures lie." Lauret Savoy, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
Quote:"As a nation, will you choose the path we have always traveled, a journey of silence that has benefited only a select group and oppressed other, or will you choose the road less traveled, a journey of racial reality that may be full of discomfort and pain, but offers benefits to all groups in our society?" Derald Wing Sue, Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence
Quote:"Our task is to honor our ancestors, even those who caved beneath the weight of systematic destruction and became conquerors themselves. Our task is to remember that we are those beautiful Earth People." Lyla June Johnston(Dine/European),Reclaiming our Indigenous European Roots
Sighted in Louise Dunlap's Inherited Silence: Listening to the Land, Healing the Colonizer Mind
Queries:
What was/is the inherited silence in your family?
How are you called to be in relationship to the inherited silences?
What are you called to in relationship to these inherited silences?
11/17/2023 Queries
Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack of Settler Privilege
By Dina Gilio-Whitaker(Colville Confederated Tribes)
Quote:“[In the US] The single, irreducible element of the racism American Indians have been subject to is the acquisition of our lands, and this is what makes racism against American Indians different than all other forms of racism and discrimination. This is the core of a system we call settler colonialism…..
All of today’s settlers and immigrants are in one way or another beneficiaries of genocide and land theft, even if they are simultaneously themselves victims of other forms of discrimination(with the possible exception of migratory Indigenous peoples of“Meso-America”). I realize this may be difficult for people of color to hear. But this is what it means to center settler colonialism as a framework for understanding the foundation of the US beyond an analysis of race, since the origins of the US are rooted in foreign invasion, not racism.”
For generations, the popular significance of Thanksgiving has centered on gratitude and hospitality.
Queries:
How might you think or act this season to give voice to the lives and stories that have been rewritten by racism and the settler colonialism lens of gratitude and hospitality?
What might allow for gratitude and grief in the practice of Thanksgiving?
11/3/2023 Queries
Queries:
What does it mean that settler society established the State of Minnesota at the expense of Indigenous Peoples?
What does it mean that Minnesota’s citizens advocated, supported and perpetrated genocidal policies so they could obtain Dakota homeland?
What does it mean that Dakota extermination and forced removal(as well as Ho-Chunk removal) were the price of Minnesota’s statehood?
Source: Waziyatawin, Ph.D. What Does Justice Look Like? The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland. Living Justice Press, 2008, St Paul, Minnesota, pp.3.4.
What can you do in your state to bring awareness of the role of colonialism in the policies being made today that continue to cause harm to resident Indigenous People’s?
How can you meeting make people aware of the impact of colonial thinking in the way laws are made?
10/27/2023 Queries
White supremacy culture teaches us to be experts and to be dominating rather than interpersonal.
Queries:
What is the culture of your meeting around the labeling of“eccentric” expressions and possible mental health concerns?
How do race, gender, ethnicity or class influence what is considered to be“eccentric” behavior?
Does your meeting have a‘companion’ model for being in relationship or an‘expert’ model?
10/26/2023 Queries
The Hicksite-Orthodox Schism and the Friends Asylum
12/1/2023 Queries
11/17/2023 Queries
11/3/2023 Queries
10/27/2023 Queries
10/26/2023 Queries