tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-217134992024-03-07T17:41:01.813-06:00Susan RaffoNow blogging at. https://www.susanraffo.com/Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.comBlogger90125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-65026525280680063242019-04-10T07:12:00.001-05:002019-04-10T07:12:19.633-05:00Change of addressHello friends, I am now blogging at <a href="http://susanraffo.com/">susanraffo.com</a> or on <a href="https://medium.com/@susanraffo">Medium</a>.Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-89480418487130859642019-03-13T09:11:00.001-05:002019-03-16T12:32:20.164-05:00Generational trauma and knowing who your real enemy is, it's all about the blood<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: large;"></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5AF1cho9Dvx0e0beJ-OqWOa7CTqtIBx4X6eGw6FR9YYdWs96TfMs2acY6zScrFtCgVDuHeVKXLlvFotkj3w1jfoHuGYhKGS_xzpNMKtEwL9rW3eQ3LHvIfRJtHhALIZW9strn/s1600/hqdefault.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="480" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5AF1cho9Dvx0e0beJ-OqWOa7CTqtIBx4X6eGw6FR9YYdWs96TfMs2acY6zScrFtCgVDuHeVKXLlvFotkj3w1jfoHuGYhKGS_xzpNMKtEwL9rW3eQ3LHvIfRJtHhALIZW9strn/s320/hqdefault.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-5e97cb2d-7fff-9a1b-9c8c-a79bdc8084a5" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 22.08px; margin-bottom: 10.66px; margin-top: 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">
</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I wrote this only days before the<a href="https://www.latinorebels.com/2019/03/15/christchurchattacks/?fbclid=IwAR3DvcAoiCQguXT-U6wnqlV0bSEBCyVqktuqrgntx2geP_w6COVkRXH_VTU"> horrific attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which 49 people, children, adults, elders, were murdered in a terrorist</a> attack, after the ongoing attack of Ilhan Omar because of words she named about the state of Israel. What I am writing about here is real. It is real in the way of leading to violence in its most physical form. I hold my prayers for those killed in Christchurch and for those murdered, generation after generation, because of what is written here. This is not just a history lesson.
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There is a line that keeps running through my head. It’s from the Hunger Games, when Finnick tells Katniss, who feels the chaos of not knowing who to trust, of not knowing who started what kind of violence and how she can feel safe, “Katniss”, Finnick says, “remember who the real enemy is.”
</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I was angry - and confused - for a lot of years about who my real enemy was. What happens when the people who love you, who are there to take care of you and protect you from when you are very small, don’t do that? What do you do with the chaos when the kin who are supposed to be in it with you actually cause even more harm? I picked leaving home, moving far away from my people, calling them out from a distance while creating new stories about why things turned out the way they did. I chose a whole bunch of space and time to figure out how to make sense of the chaos so that I could come home again. And after a time, the real enemy started to become clear.
</span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is a lot of chaos and call-out happening over Representative Ilhan Omar’s critique of the state of Israel. The responses to Representative Omar, and the responses to the responses, carry deep pain and anger. Reactions and then the reactions to the reactions are emotional, some are overly rational and many are dangerous, using the weapons of Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, indigenous disappearance and anti-Semitism with some misogyny and sexism thrown in to build a case. This level of reactivity, of intense response, means that this moment is not about the present moment. It is not about an act of physical violence, of flesh harming flesh. These reactions are to words. The intensity of these reactions are a demonstration of the impact of generational trauma. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Somewhere, there is an original wound. When violence and other forms of held trauma do not have the space to heal and integrate, then they are passed forward. Somewhere is the shape of violent disregard so intense that, generation after generation, it has moved forward as culture, as protection, as surveillance, as pain. Within the cycle of violence, all players evolve protections in order to survive. We develop protections around how we have been harmed and how we have caused harm. And then over time those protections become culture or community practice and their origins become invisible. </span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">
Chaos theory says that if we stand back far enough, there is always a pattern to emerge. Chaos is rarely chaos; we’re just in the middle of too much information without a sense of how it’s all connected to each other. Chaos is how systems of supremacy unsettle resistance. When you combine chaos with the triggering of deep fears about your ability to be ok, to survive, to be safe, then it becomes almost impossible to step away from the pattern and see clearly. Healing from deeply held trauma needs space and enough safety for the body to move through something vulnerable. State violence and surveillance and internalized violence and surveillance prevent this space and safety from emerging.
</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, indigenous disappearance and anti-Black racism would not exist if it weren’t for the violence that, over generations, emerged as the twinning of Christian supremacy and capitalism. White supremacy wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the twinning of Christian supremacy and capitalism, two belief systems that evolved at the same time.
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 22.08px; margin-bottom: 10.66px; margin-top: 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the 4</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.2px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: super; white-space: pre-wrap;">th</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> century, Emperor Constantine*</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> converted to Christianity, turning the machinations of the Roman empire into a tool for two things: grabbing land and other wealth AND converting everyone in its path to Christianity. As part of this, in 318 Constantine brought a whole bunch of Christian bishops to a meeting to create the rules of Christianity (called the Nicene Creed). Before this, Christianity was a mixed bag of belief systems including both highly patriarchal structures and highly matriarchal structures, including communities that resembled Buddhist monasteries, communities that believed in sexual pleasure as an expression of God’s divine love, communities that were still predominantly Jewish with a few changes in tradition, and more. The Nicene Creed named Christianity as the single true belief system. Over a period of generations, the pre-Christian beliefs of Rome were wiped out, sometimes violently and sometimes by conversion. </span> </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 22.08px; margin-bottom: 10.66px; margin-top: 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://jfrej.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/JFREJ-Understanding-Antisemitism-November-2017-v1-3-2.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Anti-Semitism</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> grew in shape and practice along with the growth of the Christian church, its violence waxing and waning, shifting shape and practice, but never disappearing for all of Christianity’s 2000 plus years**. </span> </span></div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">
<div dir="ltr" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 22.08px; margin-bottom: 10.66px; margin-top: 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Originating in European Christianity, antisemitism is the form of ideological oppression that targets Jews. In Europe and the United States, it has functioned to protect the prevailing economic system and the almost exclusively Christian ruling class by diverting blame for hardship onto Jews. Like all oppressions, it has deep historical roots and uses exploitation, marginalization, discrimination and violence as its tools. Like all oppressions, the ideology contains elements of dehumanization and degradation via lies and stereotypes about Jews, as well as a mythology. The myth changes and adapts to different times and places, but fundamentally it says that Jews are to blame for society’s problems. </span><a href="https://jfrej.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/JFREJ-Understanding-Antisemitism-November-2017-v1-3-2.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From Understanding Anti-Semitism</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span> </div>
<div dir="ltr" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 22.08px; margin-bottom: 10.66px; margin-top: 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The political growth of the Catholic church has depended on the tools of anti-Semitism to grow its own wealth. The history of anti-Semitism is the history of Christianity evolving an idea of “pure blood” and dangerous blood, of good and bad as essential qualities of a person rather than a type of behavior. These ideologies of dangerous and pure blood could then justify actions that otherwise go deeply against Christian values of life and forgiveness, of community and radical love; go against those values while seeming to stay in alignment with the same values. This ideology evolved along with the Christian idea that being closer to God means transcending or leaving the body. The body becomes a site of control and good bodies go to heaven while bad bodies are dangerous and must be controlled. Histories of blood sacrifice and transcendence as a part of spiritual life are almost universal, with traditions found on every continent. The development of the political Christian church used these practices as a tool for justifying the accumulation of resources through the destruction of other people, cultures and communities. This is not the only time that this has happened. This is what happened that led to our present moment.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 22.08px; margin-bottom: 10.66px; margin-top: 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the middle ages, the Roman Catholic Church employed soldiers through the Crusades or what was called the Holy wars. The Crusades especially targeted those lands of the Eastern Mediterranean, where Islam was a growing spiritual and political force. For reasons of religious conversion, in order to bring alliance among different Christian factions, and for wealth accumulation, the Crusades strengthened the idea of the Pope as the head of the Catholic church and normalized militarism as a part of religious practice. Jewish communities, “heretical” Christian communities, pagan communities and Islamic communities were attacked or often destroyed. The boundaries of the political-religious western Christian world were defined as a result of the Crusades and the political wealth of the Christian church was strengthened. </span><a href="http://arabstereotypes.org/why-stereotypes/what-orientalism" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Orientalism</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, as named by Edward Said, was the justification narrative that allowed this stage of western colonization to expand while, again, maintaining Christian Europe’s sense of living in alignment with its own values.</span> </div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-a979f404-7fff-4513-fdf6-5b957bcfc461" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 22.08px; margin-bottom: 10.66px; margin-top: 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The sense of Islam as a threatening Other - with Muslims depicted as fanatical, violent, lustful, irrational - develops during the colonial period in what I called Orientalism. The study of the Other has a lot to do with the control and dominance of Europe and the West generally in the Islamic world. And it has persisted because it's based very, very deeply in religious roots, where Islam is seen as a kind of competitor of Christianity. Edward Said in </span><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/355190.Orientalism" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Orientalism</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span> </div>
<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-8b4edc98-7fff-0caa-1b71-bdf49b7480cd" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 22.08px; margin-bottom: 10.66px; margin-top: 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Christian supremacy continued to grow, changing shape and practice depending on the country and historical moment. When the British government began to colonize the lands of the Americas, joining other European countries in the use of the institution of slavery and indigenous destruction as the primary policies of wealth accumulation, it grafted the idea of pure and dangerous blood on to the bodies of those it was targeting. This same strategy of justifying some bodies as bad and some bodies as good enabled the British and then later US governments to continue to build wealth off the bodies and lands of indigenous and Black people while still believing it lived its Christian values. The invention of the one drop rule meant that one drop of "Black blood" made you Black and therefore controllable by white supremacy whereas Blood quantum meant that you had to have a specific amount of "indigenous blood" in order to count as Native and therefore be recognized by signed treaties. Blood rules helped define strategies of surveillance used in times of war to contain the bodies of those who resisted: reservations, prisons, and then, over time, the cultural practices of educational systems, healthcare systems, and all other methods for disseminating culture. At the same time, religious practice became increasingly focused on transcendent practices, a sense of leaving the body to find relationship with God, of becoming pure Spirit, a sanctified dissociation that also supported those causing harm to not feel, in that most physical of senses, the impact of their actions. </span> </div>
</span><div dir="ltr" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 22.08px; margin-bottom: 10.66px; margin-top: 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the early 20</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11.2px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: super; white-space: pre-wrap;">th</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> century, independence movements in lands colonized by western Europe began to surge forward and an increasing western need for oil merged together. The same essentializing idea of pure and dangerous were now directed towards Islam, justifying Western war mentality by calling the Islamic world and Arab countries barbarous, cultures in need of ‘civilizing.’ The Western cultural practice of orientalism created fertile ground for the violence of Islamophobia. This became heightened as a result of 9-11 and once again, trauma repeated itself. Christian fear swelled and the need to offset that terror on a clear enemy turned into the rapidly evolving practices of Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism. </span> </div>
<div dir="ltr" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 22.08px; margin-bottom: 10.66px; margin-top: 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Anti-Semitism, anti-Black racism, indigenous disappearance, and Islamophobia are all manifestations of the same early trauma and override: the desire for wealth accumulation, the violent taking of lands and resources and bodies to accumulate that wealth, and a need to feel in alignment with deeply held Christian values. They all depend on this idea that some blood/people are dangerous and not quite human while others are pure and that it is possible to do great violence and still be a good Christian. Andrea Smith powerfully names this history in her piece, </span><a href="https://www.cpt.org/files/Undoing%20Racism%20-%20Three%20Pillars%20-%20Smith.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span> </div>
<div dir="ltr" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 22.08px; margin-bottom: 10.66px; margin-top: 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Christianity also evolved in European owning class communities to support a dissociation from the physical body and an essentializing of bodies that are “different” as needing to be controlled or dismissed. When Constantine paid for the construction of a singular unforgiving Christian doctrine that was then used to justify the expansion of Empire, he took a grassroots belief system that centered the ending of poverty and radical love and turned it into a tool of violence. Western Europe used that legacy for the development and then expansion of market capitalism. You could not have capitalism without Christianity and you could not have the spread of Christianity without capitalism.</span> </div>
<div dir="ltr" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 22.08px; margin-bottom: 10.66px; margin-top: 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Systems of belief have protective survival responses. They are held in the nervous systems of all of those who have been raised within those systems of belief, both the perpetrators and those who are harmed. In moments like this, I see multigenerational systems as having a kind of energetic form, their hands holding the marionette strings and making us dance. We lost a lot in the scientific world when we stopped talking about evil spirits. Sometimes I think it’s the only way to make visual the way these multigenerational patterns live through us, forcing so many of us to be agents of their harm even as we seek to destroy them.</span> </div>
<div dir="ltr" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 22.08px; margin-bottom: 10.66px; margin-top: 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What is happening right now is painful. And it carries with it a whole range of individual and collective experiences that have taken place since the expansion of the Roman empire and probably before. Without transformation, the cycle of violence always moves forward and those who have been harmed, too often, become those who carry the harm forward. Shifting the complex paths of pain that are twisting so tightly in the conversations and reactions swirling around Representative Omar’s comments is about more than remembering history. But remembering history is deeply important. This mess started somewhere.</span> </div>
<div dir="ltr" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 22.08px; margin-bottom: 10.66px; margin-top: 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All of my family lines are Catholic with the majority of them being Catholic as far back as can be remembered and with some of us Catholic through forced conversion within recent generations. Some of my ancestral lines represent the people who were also first colonized by the Roman Empire and who then became the ones to benefit from and move forward that wheel of violence. I assume and sometimes know that somewhere in my histories are people who supported or benefitted from anti-Semitism, the Crusades, the stealing of land, and the enslavement of free bodies. As is true with all empires, most of my people were living their lives, using their Church as the place to support their grief and family transitions. They were not thinking about strategies for wealth accumulation and that wealth rarely trickled down to their families and kin. And as is true with all empires, each and every one of us is still, in some responsible for the repair. It’s about time that energy and pain that is wound around and between those hurt by and raging against Representative Omar turn around and direct that energy towards us. Sometimes you have to look far enough back across the space of history to begin to see a pattern in the tangled mess of the present moment. Sometimes you have to look far enough back to understand why those who seem to be causing you harm are, themselves, stuck with you in a pattern of pain. In my own family, this meant looking for enough back to find the common thread that causes some of us to turn to our own kin and hoist our hurt on each other’s bodies rather than come together to fight against the violence that has become woven through our lineage. </span> </div>
<div dir="ltr" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 22.08px; margin-bottom: 10.66px; margin-top: 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 18.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the midst of chaos and generations of pain, it’s important to know who your real enemy is, your original enemy, the one who continues to benefit, especially when those who were first hurt are overwhelmed with chaos and striking against each other rather than turning to the ones who first set the violence in motion.</span></div>
* <span id="docs-internal-guid-6a59a731-7fff-909a-9bdd-d4d30792a2b7" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 13.33px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; word-spacing: 0px;">Violence begets violence. So why start with Constantine when there must have been a before? Did Constantine’s class/mixed upbringing, his witness of the Great Persecution in which state policy was to destroy all Christians, a literal genocide, before Constantine came to power and shifted state policy to use Christianity as a means to an end? And then what was the before for that?
** The political Church is not always the same as what regular folks do on the day to day. While there have always been people who have used the political Church to further their own ends and to cause harm to others, many people truly seek to be faithful and to follow the values they believe in. </span>
<br style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike></span><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike><b><br /></b></strike></div>
Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-62966338869684408202019-03-11T13:48:00.000-05:002019-03-11T13:48:34.056-05:00pushing pulling and making change<div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>Sometimes I am going to share practices or activities for helping you and your kin, the folks you work with, bring different kinds of embodiment or movement play into your work. This is an open sourced workshop. Go ahead and use it. Ask me about it. Bring me to do it with you. If you use this, please just credit where you learned it from. I learned what is on this page from Suzanne River, now passed, who learned these elements from Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen through the School for Body Mind Centering. Gratitude to Alejandra Tobar Alatriz for playing with me and helping to create and earlier and first version of this workshop.</i></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-e362c39e-6ab9-7302-8944-caf2c5c77a3b" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Pushing, pulling and making change: a 90 minute workshop</span></span></b></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span></b> <br />
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This workshop is used to explore the developmental patterns of the body that are integrated through life, supporting our bodies abilities to move, make change, integrate information and make connections with other people. Here, the workshop is used as a kind of lab or practice space to look at the collective body eg: our organizations, our collaboratives, our collectives. Through movement and information, individuals are invited to look at their social justice work critically, identifying “stuck” places or opportunities for different kinds of action. <a href="https://susanraffo.blogspot.com/2017/10/how-we-talk-about-bodies-matters.html"><b>Every directive in here can be modified to meet your body's abilities and needs</b></a>.</span></span></b><br />
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Framing time: 5 minutes</span></span></b></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Frame: this is a form of practice and learning, this is a kind of lab. This isn’t about getting anything write but it’s about surfacing information, noticing what comes up but not attaching to it. Just noticing.</span></span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">All life moves as a pattern of contraction and expansion. Every cell. Every organ. Every living organism. Every family. Every community. The planet. Expansion and contraction is what makes movement possible. If you break expansion and contraction down, you get a series of steps: </span><a href="http://www.safelyembodied.com/downloads/Yield_Trust_Handout.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>yield, push, reach, grasp, pull</b></span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, with a pause or moment of intention between each one. These are also the basic developmental movement patterns of infants: the steps we repeat as we learn how to move from a life lived only in fluid to the ability to jump in the air and catch a ball. These are also the steps we go through in order to build trust with our environment.</span></span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Today’s practice is to play with these movements: with the movement of yield, of push, of reach, of grasp and of pull. To sense where there is ease and where we are awkward. To notice where we can play or fluidly move and where we can't. This practice lifts up information. All through our work for liberation, we are going through the same steps: needing to sometimes yield, to sometimes push, to sometimes reach or grasp or pull. Everyone of us has habits; some things we do more often and other things we avoid. Don’t assume you know which is which for you or for someone else. Play with these movements and see what happens.</span></span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Take care of yourself with the movement, go where you feel comfortable, make any necessary accommodations. Remember, stillness is also a form of movement. So is breathing.</span></span></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Movement: 30 minutes</span></span></b></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Move into the developmental stages - movement practice without theory - yield - push-reach-yield-grasp-pull </span></span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: circle; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Start with tonic lab. This is also shivasana in yoga. It’s the first reflex the body has; lying on the floor and feeling gravity. Start here. Let yourself fall into gravity.</span></span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: circle; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Move to standing as you are able. Notice how this movement happens. Be curious. </span></span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: circle; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In your own space, invite your body to feel what it is to yield. To push. To reach. To grasp. To pull. Feel them clearly. Merge them. Play with them. Listen to yourself.</span></span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: circle; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Partner with another person. Do the same using each other’s hands, bodies as the other against which you pull or push. Notice what feels easy. Notice what feels awkward. Listen to what comes up in you as you practice your own development against and with the body of another.</span></span></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Framing/information language: 5 minutes</span></span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Some language about the developmental patterns and the body </span></span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: circle; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There is a pattern for how our individual bodies engage with other individual bodies as part of a broader collective body through relationship (baby against mother, developmental stages that move us towards separation, patterns that are then repeated in all of our friend/lover/colleague relationships). These have been created through an evolutionary process. They are always playing out when we are together. They are impacted by power, by intimacy, by our individual and shared physical sense.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Group exploration exercise: 15 minutes </span></span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Put sheets of paper up on the wall </span></span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: circle; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Frame: now this is the lab moment. What we believe is that any kind of change we make, any kind of activism, comes from the collective body seeking fuller embodiment/presence. What we are inviting this group to do is now be in learning lab together and to see what happens when we apply all of this to how we make change. Remember, for the purpose of this workshop, we are thinking of activism as collective strategies for making collective change. Think of different kinds of change work you are involved in - either now or in the past. Another point, everything can be a tool or a weapon. </span></span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: circle; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Break into small groups of three and reflect on the following questions</span></span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: square; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What is great or useful about each of these patterns? How does it have the potential to move your work forward?</span></span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: square; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What can potentially hinder collective process?</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">All groups share out on the pages on the wall</span></span></div>
</li>
</ul>
</ul>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Movement practice: 10 minutes</span></span></div>
<ul style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Movement break: We are going to use movement to experience the patterns again but now we will do them as a group. Because we still don’t know each other, there are a few boundaries. For one, we don’t assume that we’re about to get in a great big puppy pile of bodies. You can choose if you want to touch or be touched by others. But move into your group.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Start exploring and playing with the patterns but the point of this is to notice how the other people in your group affect you. As you move, notice if their reach shifts your push. If you feel compelled to move away from someone when they are reaching, if you feel the desire to lean into their push. Notice how your individual self is impacted by the others around you.</span></span></div>
</li>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Transition: 5 minutes paired check in.</span></span></div>
<ul style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Transition - five minute check in with your group. What did you notice?</span></span></div>
</li>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Group conversation: 15 minutes</span></span></div>
<ul style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For each of you, notice: what patterns feel more habitual, accessible or cultural? What patterns do you privilege in your movements? Your work? Your relationships? Which feel the least embodied or available as a tool to support your life? Your work?</span></span></div>
</li>
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Full embodiment of our change work means having available to us all of these movement patterns at all times. It means being able to shift between them within five minutes or within five hours or within the space of a week. Any pattern held or maintained over a long time is not sustainable. Pushing and pushing and pushing is both exhausting and limiting. </span></span></div>
</li>
<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">If there is time, more conversation about this.</span></span></div>
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</ul>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Ending circle: 5 minutes</span></span></div>
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<li><div style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In expanding, I</span></div>
</li>
<li><div style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In contracting, I</span></div>
</li>
</ul>
</b><b></b></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-81022113438567265972018-01-02T12:19:00.001-06:002018-01-02T12:46:56.553-06:00Resourcing cells, fundraising communities, and economic justice<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUqVukwy9a7lAvfyEEt0TN37pDjDSsTItAg5IlocxfcgUwSjtkOfzKImiHPOqYrV4n_uKO8Orq_Cr59bHskIZUlunAI-EE45MllXyhVfoMoTmhu8t9Cgev63PU4xeE19fqpDE5/s1600/Howbodyrebuilds.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="418" data-original-width="800" height="167" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUqVukwy9a7lAvfyEEt0TN37pDjDSsTItAg5IlocxfcgUwSjtkOfzKImiHPOqYrV4n_uKO8Orq_Cr59bHskIZUlunAI-EE45MllXyhVfoMoTmhu8t9Cgev63PU4xeE19fqpDE5/s320/Howbodyrebuilds.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Every single cell in your body has only three seconds of oxygen available at any given point. Just three seconds. Without oxygen, your cells will die. And yet every cell in your body just keeps on expanding and contracting, knowing in some deep instinctual way, that fresh oxygen will come as needed. And the great majority of the time it does. And so you stay alive.<br />
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Within each year, the body rebuilds itself multiple times over. Our life is constantly moving, constantly growing and changing and integrating the new into something different. This would not be possible without that underbelly of cellular trust. Three seconds of oxygen and then comes the rest of our lives. Breathing.<br />
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Back in the late 90s early 00s, with a group of people I started a newspaper called Siren. Our tagline was inciting conversation and our vision was to have a city newspaper that read like a conversation between everyone who lives here. This means our writers had to write every article so that it could speak to someone who knew nothing about the article's subject and to a person whose life story had just been reported. Restaurant reviews were written as though the reader was hearing someone talk about their home food and for the reader with no idea this kind of food even existed. The same for news stories and art reviews and music reviews. We didn't always get it right but we kept trying.<br />
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When Siren started, I knew nothing about business. I didn't want to know about business. I didn't want to know about budget sheets and advertising and spending plans. So I stepped away from that part of the work, keeping my focus on the editorial and the vision for the paper. I assumed they were different things, not connected at all. I had a lot of justifications for this because really, the rational mind can justify anything, but underneath it all, the business and money side scared the shit out of me. I thought it wasn't political enough or interesting. And so I stepped back.<br />
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The newspaper folded in two years for all kinds of reasons but the biggest one was that we didn't have enough cash for a project this big. The second biggest reason is that we hadn't done enough trust at the front end to deal when our values crashed around content versus cash. We fought. A lot. And it was painful, for all of us. While at the time I was full of self-righteousness about the paper's ending, the gift of distance means that I now know, tail between my legs, how I contributed to the crash.<br />
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A year or so after Siren closed, I started learning about fundraising. I was tired of being afraid of money and letting that fear actually hurt me and the communities I loved. I didn't want to be rich or earn a shit ton of cash. I wanted to make sure that no fierce and loving vision for change and connection withered and died because deep economic injustice is real in the US of A.<br />
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Like healing and organizing, resourcing the body and fundraising from communities are the same thing. The fact of their seeming difference comes from believing that the individual is separate from the community and from all of the life that is around us. Every cell lives with only three seconds of oxygen and the absolute ability to know that more oxygen is coming. The body does not separate from the things it needs: nourishment, water, oxygen. Not every part of the body is impacted by these things in the same way and yet all need them to survive. The root, stem and leaf of a planet have different relationships to the water, nourishment from the soil and carbon from the atmosphere and yet, all need them to survive.<br />
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I was mostly paying my bills from fundraising work when I began to study craniosacral therapy. Almost immediately I saw the links between these different kinds of resourcing. It all makes sense, doesn't it? There are enough resources to support our collective basic needs. There are restrictions in those resources that are set up by unfinished histories, by the policy of extraction for profit (a form of capitalism) that defined the US as a corporate state from the beginning, <a href="https://susanraffo.blogspot.com/2017/10/dealing-with-original-wounds.html">one aspect of its original wound</a>. Fundraising, when it is in right relationship, works to release or move around some of those restrictions. The same is true for the physical body; histories have set up restrictions in the tissues and bodywork supports releasing or shifting our relationship to those restrictions so that we have access to more of our life force. For awhile I met in regular conversation with two beloved friends, David Nicholson and Kate Eubank, to play with the relationship between those two things. <a href="http://www.amyvarga.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Resourcing-Fundraising-as-Part-of-Supporting-and-Building-Community.pdf">We came up with a workshop or approach to thinking about resourcing community work</a> that tried to learn from the body rather than from the systems around us.<br />
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As healers and healing practitioners, our work is about supporting each person we work with to feel and experience and deepen and grow their own resources. We work with their muscles to better experience their binding and lengthening factors. We work with their skeletal structure supporting its alignment so that the bones can have a more fluid and solid stacked relationship to gravity. We work with the fluid body, supporting the place where we live as whole integrated selves connected to all life. And we support nervous systems and circulatory systems and energetic systems to remember themselves and feel the nourishment of care. As healers and healing practitioners, most of us have some deep level of trust that part of changing the world is about supporting people to more fully feel and experience their own lives.<br />
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This is good. This is powerful. This is not enough. All energy needs to move. All life needs to move. All healers have to move dollars and other resources in support of the collective body. And all people involved in moving money have to learn about healing, both the individual and the collective selves. Period.<br />
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One of my favorite sayings these days is that we are all in the middle of the wound while we are trying to heal the wound. This means that how we have been hurt and survived defines how we even think about transformation. The way we have loved and connected despite the shit also feeds how we know that liberation is possible. Both are true. And for me as a bodyworker, my responsibility is to shift the conditions around healing and bodywork as much as it is about showing up in right relationship in the bodywork room.<br />
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Two or three times a year I am going to use this blog to try and move some cash from places where there is extra to places where more is needed. And I am going to ask you to do the same. I'll ask you to do it with me or to do it on your own. And I'll share what I've learned and ask you about what you've learned. And maybe out of this, we'll support some of what is tight to get a bit more fluid.<br />
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Here is what I am doing right now to weave together the resourcing of the individual body with the resourcing of community, to bridge the false gap between healing and organizing, and to then please god just get out of the way and let liberation take its own path. I don't assume this is enough or even the right answer, it's just the right answer that I hear whispered in my dreams when I ask ancestors and spirits, what next?<br />
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First, <a href="https://www.youcaring.com/peoplesmovementcenter-1055394">supporting a cohort of Native, Black, Brown, trans and queer biodynamic craniosacral therapists</a>. This feels huge to me. It feels urgent. I am not going to list all of the horrible things that are happening and have recently happened that underscore the need for both ending violence and then supporting the healing of those impacted by violence. There are so many who right this second need to tolerate the intolerable. Click the link and read more about this dream and vision. And by dream, I mean literal dream. Like ancestors showing up amidst the snores, crossing their legs, raising an eyebrow and saying, hey descendant, get your ass moving. <br />
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A bit more context for this fundraiser: when the American Medical Association was created in the 19th century, its focus was on determining which kinds of healthcare were real and which were quackery*. At the time, outside of cultural healing traditions within tribal lands and elsewhere, homeopathy was the highest used form of healthcare within what is called the US. Allopathic or what we call western medicine had a smaller community of support. After the AMA was formed, multiple types of healing were discredited within the mainstream (meaning primarily European descended and government supported) world. Practices like midwifery, working with plant medicine, healing touch, acupuncture, bone setting and more were practiced in Black communities, in Native and other indigenous communities, and in immigrant and refugee communities. One of the strategies for building and shifting white supremacy was to build identity around those who followed "scientifically proven" medical methods and those who practiced "primitive" forms of care. Over time, those "primitive" forms of care (which, of course, still worked) were then made illegal, particularly in the cases of tribal cultural practices of care, midwifery and acupuncture. Healing traditions evolve over generations, tied to a community's language and cultural ways of passing on meaning and survival. Forcing away a community's healing traditions is another aspect of the violence of supremacist culture. This fundraiser and cohort is only one very small not enough moment in attempting to respond, as a healer, to the truth of this violence.<br />
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Second, supporting the <a href="http://www.peoplesmovementcenter.com/people-s-fund.html">People's Fund</a> at the People's Movement Center. This fund supports free and reduced bodywork and sustainable supported bodyworkers. A basic win win.<br />
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If you can give to both, give to both. If you have to pick one, please give to the cohort. Right now. Supporting something like 15 Native, Black, Brown, queer and trans people to build their own practices is about supporting circles to keep expanding outward. This is not enough. There needs to be more. This is still something.<br />
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Our bodies know how to live as though there was enough. We rebuild ourselves, cell by cell, every day. Only three seconds of oxygen and yet, each cell keeps contracting and expanding. Our bodies remember what it is to know that there is enough. Shifting how the collective body holds the resources of money and time and knowledge and practice so that individual bodies can, together, begin to experience what our cells already know is one part of our larger work of liberation.<br />
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*While this is a real telling of history, I am also not one of those bodyworkers who is anti-western medicine. Thank god for how it is has literally saved the lives of many who I love. And oh grief for how the fierce caring and healing work of some of its members has been shaped and harmed by the insurance industry, by the cultures of consumerism and competition, and by the disconnection of a single life from the rest of all life.<br />
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** A few people have reflected that the illustration about this article is most often used to get people to go on diets. I had no idea and want to yell about that. No diets were supported or tried or experienced or demanded in the writing of this blog post. Our bodies rebuild themselves just because they do, not to change their shape but to integrate the enormity of life.<br />
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<br />Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-88435366793121333092017-12-15T08:57:00.003-06:002017-12-15T08:57:14.137-06:00What is healing justice and how would it affect this gathering?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjTX9rzYScFsOu-H4C5zM791iemUtgTvWX3EY0KN1b00FU4z6vJS84yzTaODV75WKzHl2Ktggo3vcHr8iuzmSc_Hg5nhvqLWUtGscfEBdUbHo-gzR0FnujECL_LYLSxDg7WxTo/s1600/th.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="276" data-original-width="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjTX9rzYScFsOu-H4C5zM791iemUtgTvWX3EY0KN1b00FU4z6vJS84yzTaODV75WKzHl2Ktggo3vcHr8iuzmSc_Hg5nhvqLWUtGscfEBdUbHo-gzR0FnujECL_LYLSxDg7WxTo/s1600/th.jpg" /></a></div>
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<i>Yesterday I got to record a podcast conversation about the healing justice work at the USSF in Atlanta and Detroit with Cara Page and Kate Werning. I got off the phone and then went back to look at some of the documents we put together in 2010. This is something I wrote after we were already at Detroit. We were talking about how much confusion there was about how healing justice could be a lens on deep movement work, on actions and cultural change. So I wrote this and we printed about 500 copies and spread it in rooms around the Social Forum. Re-reading it I thought, yep, as HJ work often gets perceived as happening in separate spaces from where movement is taking place, this flyer is still relevant. If it's useful to you, go ahead and use it. Love credit it as appropriate.</i></div>
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<i><br /></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; margin: 0px;">A conversation takes place about
working conditions for agricultural workers or maybe about housing foreclosures
and you are listening to it when you feel something shift inside. This is not
just an intellectual conversation. This is about your life. You feel your heart
race and a mix of emotions are suddenly flooding through your body. Maybe you
are angry. Maybe you want to cry. It is hard to just sit in a chair and talk
about this as an issue. It seems no one else in the room has experienced what
you have. So you shut down, get quiet, and wait for the session to be done so
you can leave. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; margin: 0px;">You are taking part in an action
exercise, practicing using storytelling as a skill for mobilization. In the
midst of a practice session, you can feel your voice get tight. You were
talking about prisons and violence. It becomes hard to speak. You are
embarrassed because usually you can talk about this really easily. You think of
yourself as articulate. You leave the room as soon as you can, worried that
people are going to remember you, that you didn’t have anything to say. You’re
glad there wasn’t anyone from your hometown to witness you fumbling.</span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; margin: 0px;">Two people with different beliefs, both undocumented, are
arguing about how to organize in immigrant communities and about the roles of
nonprofit organizations in social justice work. Their argument begins to get
heated. People in the room freeze up, not sure what to do. A few people leave.
Others take sides. You’re one of the people in the room. You don’t know what to
do. You feel like you should say something but you aren’t sure what to say.
You’re afraid they’ll turn on you. Or maybe you’re one of the people arguing.
You don’t really want to keep fighting like this but it’s gone so far, it’s
hard to back down. Or maybe you’re in the room and you say something and
suddenly everyone is looking at you. The conversation ends when everyone leaves
but the tension never finishes. Something got stuck and people leave, feeling
uncomfortable.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; margin: 0px;">There is nothing we talk about in
movement building work that is only an “issue.” These are things we have
experienced. Our bodies, our communities, our memories carry all of the times
when we experienced or witnessed violence, systemic disrespect, or
marginalization.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>When we are working
together to change systems and beliefs, we are also carrying the fallout from
those systems and beliefs inside our selves. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; margin: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; margin: 0px;">Healing Justice means taking seriously
the effect of trauma, oppression and violence in our lives. It means
recognizing that when we are uncomfortable or scared or furious, this is
important information. We can learn from this information. We can shift what is
happening in our bodies. The role of healing justice practitioners is to come
into those spaces described above and to help shift what is happening. Often
the reason we get stuck or feel like we need to run from the room or start
fighting with someone who can and should be an ally is because of what we are
holding.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>This holding affects how deeply
we can dream and how far we can vision. Ending oppression means ending how it
exists in our communities and in the systems around us – and it means ending
how it lives within our bodies.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; margin: 0px;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; margin: 0px;"><i>Deep gratitude to those building on the ground at the USSF in Detroit, 2010.</i></span><br />
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Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-55126749739625314342017-11-28T16:13:00.000-06:002017-11-29T16:19:26.439-06:00The Medical Industrial Complex with gratitude to Mia Mingus, Patty Berne and Cara Page (plus others)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-C9dpam0dGrhmB62BBy8a35EWNU0mgPXhTxV6wfp4qd_pinAz_KTxPmjmd3-LLAK2Wd6VngiW6PlyGwIW2b922dpX77USks4_BCjaRm8SiSw_mZKIa8i5VXDamToetblNPHGM/s1600/mic-visual-version-2015-12.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="720" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-C9dpam0dGrhmB62BBy8a35EWNU0mgPXhTxV6wfp4qd_pinAz_KTxPmjmd3-LLAK2Wd6VngiW6PlyGwIW2b922dpX77USks4_BCjaRm8SiSw_mZKIa8i5VXDamToetblNPHGM/s320/mic-visual-version-2015-12.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Very simply, if we are not careful, all of our healing justice work is going to become just another piece of the machine. If we are not careful, the culturally-grounded, beautiful and deeply loving spaces that we are creating, private spaces with handmade artwork on the walls, will become a node on the organized profit machine that is the medical industrial complex.<br />
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The illustration above is a map that Mia Mingus, Patty Berne, Cara Page and a number of other disability and healing justice thinkers put together after a multipart conversation. <a href="https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2015/02/06/medical-industrial-complex-visual/"><b>Mia explains it beautifully and offers more explanation</b></a> as a tool in our work for collective liberation.<br />
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When I was in my late 20s, after having dropped out of college for about 10 years, I decided I wanted to finish my degree. I had also been living away from the US and so, upon coming back, decided to enroll at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. I liked that Antioch was focused on experiential learning. As students we were less in the classroom and more in the world, doing internships and learning by just being in life. A more radical and glorious bunch of people you couldn't find. It was there, amidst the corn fields and old wooden farm houses, that I started to wonder if I had been duped. After all, it was perfect. We had a contained bubble of hundreds of incredibly radical folks, mostly young and very very able-bodied. Everyone slept with each other. Fought with each other. Introduced each other to friends living in other contained bubbles in other towns and cities. And we grew perfect and strong. And I remembered how the immune system has evolved to operate: when there is a danger to the body that would take a lot of energy to destroy or expel, it contains it within a membrane, something that mimics being connected to all life but is, instead, off doing its own thing and not negatively impacting the body as a whole. I sat there in Yellow Springs and felt the containment, even as we were all talking about revolution. How very non-threatening we all were.<br />
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I think about this when I think about my work at the People's Movement Center in Minneapolis. I am so grateful for our work. I believe it is important. But I also believe that, if we aren't careful, we are going to become that node on the top right of the Medical Industrial Complex map; a contained little membrane where those who have access, like a secret code, can come through our doors and be there, in the closed off membrane along with the rest of us.<br />
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I don't actually think that is happening. I think this is happening. I think both are true. I love the vision that Mia offers in the essay that goes along with the chart:<br />
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<i>I am inspired by the possibilities that can be grown out of the rich fertile ground where disability justice and healing justice meet and overlap. I ache for more healers that don’t continue to perpetuate ableist notions of how bodies should be (or strive to be) and for disabled folks who don’t have to only know “healing” as a violent word because of our histories of forced healing, cures and fixing. I get excited about practitioners who have accessible spaces and practices that can hold all kinds of bodies and minds; and collective access and care that allows more and more disabled people to be less and less bound to the state.</i><br />
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<i></i>I assume there are healers and other practitioners reading this blog. If so, I link arms with you and say, here is our struggle. We have a large public, a medical industrial complex, which is how most people, particularly those who are poor and Black and Brown, get their care. This is a system designed to manage people, to weed out the "abnormal" from the "normal," a process of eugenics I wrote about in an <a href="https://susanraffo.blogspot.com/2017/10/how-we-talk-about-bodies-matters.html"><b>earlier blog post</b></a>. There are also significant powerful people working in this system who are trying to make change, to remain relational, to shift healthcare as control into something that recognizes our complex humanity. I want to be in community with those people and with you to learn how to do all of this: to do the kind of transformative liberated work that is not possible within the bounds of most parts of the medical system and, at the same time, to refuse to let ourselves be privatized. Not a single one of us can heal until all are healed. </div>
<br />Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com0Minneapolis, MN, USA44.977753 -93.26501080000002744.7980145 -93.587734300000022 45.1574915 -92.942287300000032tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-21030208172892213042017-11-20T14:24:00.001-06:002017-11-20T14:58:29.709-06:00Healing within the context of land and history<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJy8qKBW9gONDXJsfZtatJCW6rR2bcIE50VD_R1CoU6IkFIWOl20yLpi09YjujRbEyA0hiLLJO1UxmgdSw_ERn_Zhoka7cxacJ00CEdWYpv6vKSxNUuSOyjM5r1itZqHKlq7Jv/s1600/tribal_nation_map_custom-973eefab3541e8d2c23056100549ac543e59beee-s1100-c15.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1061" data-original-width="1088" height="312" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJy8qKBW9gONDXJsfZtatJCW6rR2bcIE50VD_R1CoU6IkFIWOl20yLpi09YjujRbEyA0hiLLJO1UxmgdSw_ERn_Zhoka7cxacJ00CEdWYpv6vKSxNUuSOyjM5r1itZqHKlq7Jv/s320/tribal_nation_map_custom-973eefab3541e8d2c23056100549ac543e59beee-s1100-c15.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><i>This is a week when people are either celebrating or resisting the story of how first contact between settlers and Native people happened. This is something I wrote as part of <b><a href="http://www.peoplesmovementcenter.org/">The People's Movement Center</a>,</b> as we sat within the questions asked below. Any mistakes I have made in the telling of these stories, especially the stories that are not my history to tell, are my own mistakes and I am accountable for them.</i></span><br />
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><i><br /></i></span></b>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It always starts with the land….</span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What does it mean to do healing work, to do any kind of change work when the land below your feet still carries stories that are not finished?</span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">For 50,000 generations people lived right here, on this land that is under my feet. If you, too, are sitting on this land mass that got called North America, then you, too, are living where for 50,000 generations people lived and continue to live. Real people. Complex people. People who were loving and mean, who laughed and who got overly dramatic. People have lived here, right here, before the glaciers came and after, lived here for, as the stories tell us, 50,000 generations, that is how long we were here. Some of the stories of those times are still here, held by the grandmothers and shared with the children. Some of these stories are gone, scooped out along with water from the slough, dried out and then dust flown in the wind. Ghosts that scattered along with top soil, settling in the cracks between here and there. </span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This the Dakota homeland, here where I live. My home is about 3 miles from the confluence of the Mississippi and MInnesota Rivers, Bdote, the Dakota homelands.</span></b><br />
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This is land that is soil on top of sand, loose below us where the glaciers ground their way down through mountain and stone to leave sand and boulders, soft land that lets the water run through it, weaving and snaking its way into rivers and springs. This is a land where there is water.</span></b><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">50,000 generations of real people lived here and they did many things but there is one thing they did not do: they did not forget their relationship to the land and all living things in relation to that land. They did not bring the violence of disconnection and control that destroys life. This is why they could live here for 50,000 generations, within a land that was wild even as it was known, was loved even as it was farmed. </span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I work and live in south Minneapolis. Dakota people hunted and their children played right where the pavement runs through. Their families were here in 1500 when French trappers first portaged and then river-wandered from the northern lakes to the southern prairie and oak savannah.</span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I am not going to do this alone. If you are reading this, I want to know: Do you know your original peoples and your traditional ways? If they are not your people, then do you know the people original to the land where you live? Do you know the people who walked the land for generations before you rented your apartment, bought your house, planted your garden, and put out your recycling bins? Why are you reading this story? How do you want it to help you?</span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">20 generations ago is when the first settlers arrived to the northern parts of this land, bringing with them the separation that they had already learned on the lands where they began. They brought their understandings of private property and land ownership and they began to settle. These people were French trappers who wandered rivers and lakes making business deals with original people. After them came the army, first wave of the surge that would take trees and furs and ore including someday oil from pipelines, the army came and over time drove the Dakota villagers who had lived along the river banks for generations, drove them further away. Some settled along Bde Maka Ska, settling with a small farm where Lakewood Cemetery is today. Here is where Chief Cloudman lived and where some of the first Christian missionaries also set up, working to enforce western language and cultural traditions with the intent to break the cultural link the Dakota people have with the land. When you look at very old maps, there is a trail that goes from <a href="http://bdotememorymap.org/"><b>Bdote</b></a> to <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Bde-Maka-Ska-Name-Reclamation-976582865759475"><b>Bde Maka Ska</b></a> and it passes very near to where my work, the <a href="http://www.peoplesmovementcenter.org/"><b>People’s Movement Center</b></a>, stands. </span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">By the time the French and then the army came, there would have been squatters here, too; Europeans who came and just put up a tent, a shack, a rough house. So many of those early settlers were young people, just like young white US travelers today, young people who leave their homes to go to different lands where they can have adventures before they go back home to their families. Collecting stories like empty skulls. Some people came because they didn’t fit in back home, because it wasn’t safe anymore to be back home, or because they felt the call deep inside for something that was wilder than cities and farms. Some became friends with people from local tribes and some did not. They hunted. They fished. Sometimes they farmed and then they died or else, when the city got bigger they went further north and settled in whatever corner they could find. I think of them when I drive up to northern Minnesota and see the houses that are made of plywood and twine, the old white men with beards down past their knees who live by hunting and gathering, signs with pictures of guns posted along their fences.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">And there were treaties. Did you know that even as the first settlers began to establish St. Anthony and what would later become St. Paul, what is now Minneapolis remained only Dakota territory until 1851? 50,000 generations lived on this land and it is only been seven generations since settlers overtook this Dakota territory. Seven generations since the Twin Cities went from being held by original peoples to being controlled by settlers. Seven generations against 50,000.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://treatiesmatter.org/treaties"><b>Agreements between nations</b></a>, agreements like we have free trade agreements today, agreements as a tense compromise between the rich and greedy and the poorer in need of work. Or the poor and greedy, hoping to be the winners this time. Land gluttony. It happened fast, like a plague. Within a generation, the balance tipped from mostly original peoples to those who were not. In 1862 the US government passed the Homestead Act, opening up ceded (and violently taken unceded) land for settlement. That same year, 1862, Dakota families were hungry and had not received the food and supplies promised through treaty. Young people, frustrated with weeks of promises and growing hunger, fought, protested, raged, and this became the <a href="http://www.livingjusticepress.org/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC={C77C5426-031A-4F37-A7A4-09B76B8B3C5B}"><b>Dakota War of 1862</b></a>. President Lincoln sent in troops, many the same troops who had just fought in the Civil War, and at the end of the battles, those Dakota families remaining along the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers were removed, exiled, such violence, the uprooting of a people from their land, their history. Their warriors, 38+2, were murdered and after all of that, what mattered most to those who came was that now there was more land. The stories shared in newspapers to the east told the stories of land, free land, not the stories of the families whose lives had just been traded for federal profit.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">More settlers came, buying farms along the Minnesota River, the Mississippi River, the St. Croix, spreading and calling their families to come and then spreading further. Trees cut down to make railroad ties. Swamps filled in. Banks and more banks opening and then closing as money changed white hands, exploded into wealth for some and disappeared over night for others. The squatters were kicked out and now land was bought with legal paper. Irish carpenters and tavern keepers, Swiss and Welsh laborers, German butchers and cigar makers, English masons, and Scots bakers joined farmers from Germany, Canada, and older areas of the United States, wagon makers from New York, hotelkeepers from Virginia, lawyers and merchants from Pennsylvania, millwrights from Ohio, ministers, teachers, and tailors from New England, and French-Canadian voyageurs and blacksmiths to spread over Minnesota including these neighborhood blocks just outside my door. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Where were your people between 1750 and 1850? Did they have sovereignty over their own lives? Were they owned or did they own? Do you know the stories of who you were for those years? Do you know specifics or only something general? What happens for you when you think about that time, about what you know or don’t know? How close do you feel to them? Seven generations, .00000001875 percent of the time that we have been evolving on this planet, .013 percent of the time since the last ice age crossed the land below our feet. What do you know about your people from just seven generations ago? Six generations ago? The time of your great-grandparent’s great grandparents.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The city grew. US policy towards the original peoples moved to <a href="http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4929/"><b>Kill the Indian/Save the Man</b></a>, and boarding schools were set up, the children and grandchildren of those who lived along the river, who might have hunted where my home now stands, being removed from their families, from our families, and sent to Christian schools to disappear the Dakota, the Anishinabeg. And the memories of those who remembered when there were more oak trees than people faded in the way that the stories of our great grandparents become only vaguely told sentences without the feeling of what it was like. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">But not all of the stories disappeared. And they did not win. Even as the story, the violences, are not finished it is important to pause here and say this: they did not win. The stories are not gone. The people are still here, stronger and fighting back. Which side are you on? </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The city grew. Flour mills and lumberyards growing fat off of the homesteading of the prairie and the cutting of the great north woods. And Minneapolis grew. Almost tripling in size between 1900 and 1950, we are creeping into the memories of your grandparents and parents, of the stories those of you who grew up here might now remember.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In 1910 all over the United States, “<a href="http://editions.lib.umn.edu/openrivers/article/mapping-racial-covenants-in-twentieth-century-minneapolis/"><b>racial convenants</b></a>” were legal instruments inserted into property deeds that prohibited people defined as “not Caucasian” from purchasing or inhabiting homes. This happened all over the country and also in </span><a href="https://www.mappingprejudice.org/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>south Minneapolis</b></span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. The list of excluded groups reflected the racial assumptions of developers, real estate professionals, and homeowners. A common covenant read, “[this property] shall not at any time be conveyed, mortgaged or leased to any person or persons of Chinese, Japanese, Moorish, Turkish, Negro, Mongolian or African blood or descent.” Penalties for anyone who tried to break these covenants was severe and included losing your home and any money you had put into the property (equity). Looking at the map linked above, you can see the demographics of south Minneapolis laid out along with these 100 year old expression of legal segregation. Each economic development choice, when weighed against these racial covenants, defined the city, who lived in it and therefore who had access to all of the benefits of a livable city. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Who in your family was alive in 1914, how many generations before your birth? Did they live in the US? In Minnesota? How many of them lived in Minneapolis? Or were they even allowed to? This was the time of eugenics in the United States, when people of color, the poor, folks with disabilities, queers were being institutionalized, sterilized. Radio was new. Catholics were following Father Coughlin by the millions as he ladled up his version of sacred normalcy. This was World War 1, the Great Migration. When many of your family stories are still remembered. What did your grandparents, great grandparents tell about this time? How did it make who you are today?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This is around the same time when the Mexican community in south Minneapolis began to grow. Sugar beet companies in rural Minnesota began to recruit families to come up from Texas to work in the sugar beet fields. Some of the <a href="http://www.ebanexperience.com/uploads/5/6/8/7/5687864/eban_latinos_present_session_3.pdf"><b>betabeleros</b></a> returned to Texas during the winter months but others stayed and built homes in the Cities. While the largest community lived in St. Paul, a smaller community lived near the PMC on Chicago Avenue and further north to Nicollet avenue. In the 1930s and 50s, as the sugar beet industry began to wane and as economic controls after the Great Depression were put into place, many of these families were deported, both those who were undocumented and those who were legal residents. Just like now.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Great Depression and everything afterwards when frightened people were looking for scapegoats. In poorer neighborhoods in Minneapolis, unemployment was over 25% In 1931, nationally Minneapolis became known for its food riots as neighbors broke into grocery stores, stealing food to feed each other. In 1931 white residents stormed a <a href="http://www.startribune.com/july-16-1931-angry-white-mob-surrounds-minneapolis-home/283979011/"><b>Black family's home in south Minneapolis</b></a>, demanding they leave, demanding that their neighborhood stay white. Economic fear and white control have always gone hand in hand.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What stories exist in your family from the Great Depression? Were they here in the US? Food and housing insecurity was at an all time high. People both gathered together in collectives and support systems and they turned on each other, looking for people to blame. Eugenics continued to gain national traction as the reason for everything bad. During this period, 2,350 people were involuntarily sterilized in Minneapolis, most of them defined as “mentally ill” or “mentally deficient.” How did your family fit into this story? What themes from this time are coming up again today? Why?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Minneapolis General Strike of 1934 ended in riots with the police opening fire on labor union organizers and protesters. Two were killed and 67 injured. The strike closed down all transportation in Minneapolis and the state declared martial law. Many of the workers lived where I live and where I work. This was 7 years before my mother was born. I grew up hearing stories of the Great Depression and of the strikes from my great grandparents and grandparents. This is recent history. This is yesterday.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In 1934, the Federal Housing Administration developed a system for classifying homes for home buyers based on their resale value and were marked green for the most desirable and red for the least desirable. And thus was redlining born. At this time, race in Minneapolis was defined as Native-born white, foreign-born white and Black. In 1930 and 1940, Black families made up .9% of the population. If you pay attention to local politics, then you know how redlining impacted North Minneapolis. Funds dried up. Economic segregation became tied to racial segregation. And that history has still not recovered. Four blocks north of the <a href="http://www.peoplesmovementcenter.org/"><b>People’s Movement Center</b></a>, where I work, just as you cross Park Avenue, you enter the redlined zone. The PMC was not in a redlined area but the PMC is on the transition space, the border. Two blocks down, at 41</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 10.2pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: super;">st</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> and 4</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 10.2pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: super;">th</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, was Mrs. Little’s boarding house. Here is where Black folks new to town stayed in order to figure out their next steps. What we know about all border towns and border areas is that this is where the likelihood of conflict – as well as of creative transformation and power – increases.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In the same year, the Indian Reorganization Act demanded that, in order to be recognized by the federal government, tribal communities must organize themselves in cookie cutter ways, not by their own traditions and cultures, but by a management system that made sense to the government. And for those who were not tied to a tribal community through a reservation or for those tribal communities that the federal government decided no longer existed, the US brought in a policy of assimilation, moving Native peoples to urban areas for resettlement. And so some of the children and grandchildren of Dakota and Anishinabeg peoples were moved into federal housing in Chicago and Cleveland and Milwaukee… and also to south Minneapolis, back to their original lands but now as relocated persons within their own land.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Did you grow up in an urban area? What do you know about your neighborhood in relation to redlining or the Indian Reorganization Act? Did you grow up in a rural area? What was the racial make-up of your community? Where did who live? Was there formal or informal segregation? Were there visible indigenous people, indigenous to this land? Again, what did this all mean for your family? What did you not know because of these things? How do these stories relate to your family's origin stories, the story of how they came to be? Of where they come from and who they are? Is there a connection or were those stories told as separate things? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">There is so much more history to tell about this land where I now live. There is history to tell about the land where I was born, Cleveland, Ohio, the land of Tecumseh and the first pan-tribal resistance to the violence of settlement. There is history of busing and civil rights, history of hate crimes like the Duluth lynchings in Minnesota and the Black uprisings in the Hough neighborhood in Cleveland the year I was born and multiple times after. There are also so many stories of survival and resilience in all of these lands where I live and where I come from.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As healers and healing practitioners, these are the stories, the contexts that weave through the bodies that come to see us, sometimes visible, often invisible. This is the broader imprint that defines how the person sitting across from us feels: the food they eat, the air they breathe, the violence their people experienced or enacted, the shape of their home growing up and their home now, whether or not their was a yard, a safe place to play, other children who looked like them, the concern of threat from the sound of a doorbell or the fact that their neighbors would call the police if strangers came by. Private property or public housing, there are stories behind those homes that come up through the floorboards and settle in our bones. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Plantain root. Dandelions. Some of the elms planted along the boulevards, pineapple weed, thistle, comfrey, all of the kinds of clover, motherwort, mugwort, and mullein. These are all medicinal plants. They grow in the alleyways behind Minneapolis homes, you find them along the roads and in public parks. Their ancestors were carried over in the pockets of settlers who brought their pharmacy with them, seeds they spread in their gardens who then escaped and became, like their sowers, transplants that crowded out what had been here before. They are medicinal plants. They heal. They are also colonizer plants. They have crowded out plants that are Native to this land, the plants that form the oak savannah and the water logged sloughs of what is now south Minneapolis. Both of these things are true. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">And this is the challenge in being healers on this land who are not original to this land. This is the generosity shown by those who are original to this land who turn to those who are not in order to heal.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">There are ghosts that walk our streets, right this second, as you take a deep breath and listen to the stories that you know and don’t remember, do you know who you are and why you are here? Do you know what your life has been created for? And why you are here, on this page, hearing this story, and remembering? What is that you are here to heal? And what is it within you that needs to be healed?</span></div>
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<i>To purchase the map at the top of this post and others like it, go to http://www.tribalnationsmaps.com/.</i>Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-28985801218904300492017-11-13T18:38:00.002-06:002017-11-14T06:16:29.424-06:00#MeToo and I will fight for you<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy5dfhvvTXjD2EWAbXjuWmNz8m_so2WYQtf5o1vVZqK9oamyMIf8K1lrHvxhqLz3_TbR4TPtFrs5tItyVF7rTbWR8Fv5D5mEfjT-5j1IMrlwGJ0gqRGeuk6WLFbBF-1IRIXzLP/s1600/thLH93A2GC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="187" data-original-width="333" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy5dfhvvTXjD2EWAbXjuWmNz8m_so2WYQtf5o1vVZqK9oamyMIf8K1lrHvxhqLz3_TbR4TPtFrs5tItyVF7rTbWR8Fv5D5mEfjT-5j1IMrlwGJ0gqRGeuk6WLFbBF-1IRIXzLP/s320/thLH93A2GC.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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It was when I was talking with someone today, a friend who had come for bodywork. This friend has been hurt. A lot. She's been hurt by family members, by men, by queers. She is well known and well loved and most people have no idea she has been hurt. Most people have no idea of the space between her outside self and the inside self that she keeps protected far inside.</div>
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There are so many people I know and love like that; people experiencing not just a subtle but an extreme gap between the person they show and the person they protect.</div>
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We were talking about a couple of different situations she is in; situations that wander the line from fucked up to abusive. As we were talking, I suddenly felt very fierce. I leaned in towards her and said, "You have to know this, right now. What has happened to you in the past is never going to happen to you again. Not on my watch." She got soft and quiet, looking at me from the other side of the wall that she keeps well built. Careful. Cautious. "If you get into a situation that feels unsafe or you are not sure that it's safe, call or text me. If that isn't enough, then I will pick up my keys and come get you. I will stay connected to you until we are both sure that you are safe enough to be alone." I was feeling this really fiercely. Nothing I was saying to her isn't something I haven't said or felt before and still, it was there, and it felt wild and rageful, protective and fierce.</div>
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She and I had just been talking about the most recent round of white cismen being called out and called up for their past and present sexual violence. We were talking, as we have in the past, about the power in watching individual white men no longer able to hide, losing their jobs, losing some of the celebrity respect they have gathered. At the same time, we reflected that what is happening, this allowance and normalization of constant gender-based terror, is much bigger than any individual white man's accountability - or obvious lack of accountability - can touch. We reflected on how grateful we were that <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2017/11/rebecca-traister-on-the-post-weinstein-reckoning.html"><b>some of the articles coming out</b></a> name the widespread and sometimes nuanced truth of sexual violence, how it is more than what any individual white cisman does. That articles are coming out that are also <a href="http://that%20articles%20are%20coming%20out%20that%20are%20also%20naming%20women%20as%20complicit,%20calling%20out%20all%20of%20the%20times%20when%20women/"><b>naming women as complicit</b></a>, calling out all of the times when women turn on other women. This sexual violence is about the air that we breathe, something so constant and ever-present that many of us no longer recognize it as violence. We shared our frustration that in all of the conversation about this moment, rarely are white ciswomen, no matter how hurt they have been, holding the complexity of race and white supremacy in this moment. We know that sexual violence combined with racial violence is another deeper story entirely and that white women have sometimes condoned it as a way of getting the attention off their own backs. </div>
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Sexual violence did not exist on this land before colonization. Sexual violence has culture and history. In the US it is lifted up, supported and pruned by histories of Christianity and European class histories which then, depending on the cultures and histories of your family and kin, mixes with what your people knew as "normal" before settling here. Sexual violence did not exist on this land before colonization, before immigration, before Christian missionaries carried with them the idea of women (and land and sex and children) as being subservient and in need of control. <b></b></div>
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This is what we were talking about before I asked my friend how she sits within this moment when her own tissues carry memories that have largely never been voiced. This is when she shut down. This is what propelled me to fight for her. In that moment and into the future.</div>
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I have seen women fight for other women. Ciswomen. Transwomen. Poor women, Native, Black and Brown women. I have witnessed it and experienced it. It's usually something that happens on the streets or in someone's home or together, in a private room, <a href="https://www.akpress.org/revolutionstartsathome.html"><b>as women in movement work are figuring out how to have each other's backs</b></a> against the sexual violence from those they are supposed to be standing with as they fight against white supremacy, ableism, deportations. I have seen women fight for and on behalf of other women, fighting as an intimate thing, a personal thing, not the work of policies and nonprofits. I have seen it. But not enough.</div>
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As my friend and I talked, we noticed that this is the connective tissue. This is the piece that wants to be added to this work of calling out and naming the perpetrators and then calling out and naming how we have passed our ways of survival on to our daughters, how we have separated ourselves from others experiencing sexual violence because of how they dressed, because of their class, because of their race, because they were not straight or cisgender or the billion other ways that you who are reading this, like me, sometimes opt out of stopping sexual violence. We noticed how often sexual violence can bring out the predator in everyone, even those who have long been victimized themselves. And we noticed the many times when it doesn't.</div>
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As healers and healing justice practitioners, we know that in order to get past survival, we have to be able to fight for our own lives. And that in order to fight for our own lives, we have to believe, in the deepest part of our beings, that our life is worth fighting for. This is the core belly truth that oppression works to unsettle. </div>
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What happens if every single one of us who experiences or has experienced sexual violence on the basis of our gender turns to two or three or five or ten others in our lives and tells them: Never again on my watch. I will fight for you. And then explains, concretely and with detail, exactly what that means. Here is my number. Here is how I have seen you get hurt. Here is the threat I know you live under every day. No longer on my watch. Call me and tell me what it was like and I will believe you, even if you think it was small. And more than that, I will come and find you. I will put my body between yours and his (or sometimes hers or theirs) and I will not let this happen to you again. </div>
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Sexual violence mixes with every other form of violence and it is messy and hard. Not all of us are impacted by it in the same way. Not all of us experience the same level of threat. And at the same time, no women, no fem-presenting person, should ever, no matter what their life is like and what they are aware and not aware of, be the victim of sexual violence. Not on our watch. What happens if we tell each other: I will take a self defense class with you. I will sleep over if you feel unsafe. I will remember that no matter what he (or she or they) say or do, that I am fierce about your safety as you are about mine. I will do this as an everyday thing and I will remind you, as you will remind me, that never again on our watch, never again, will you be the victim to someone else's predator.<br />
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We all have the right to a fight response. To our fight response. To our right to fight.</div>
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Someone recently told me the story (and she might have heard it from Adrienne Maree Brown but I now can't remember) of <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/wildlife/4736472/The-mathematics-of-murmurating-starlings.html"><b>how swallow murmurations happen</b></a>. Each bird flies as closely as possible to the one next to it, keeping track of that bird, keeping eyes on that single bird, who is doing the same to the next to it and the one next to it and so on. By doing this, the birds fly together and move forward, making stunning visual effects as they weave and shift together. They move forward. They move forward together. They each keep watch on the other.</div>
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Go ahead. If you are reading this, make a list of 2 or 3 or 5 or 10 women, fem-presenting people, and tell them, concretely and with as much detail as you can, not on my watch, never again. And then watch us fly.</div>
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#MMIW </div>
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Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-66228949972752267662017-11-11T13:30:00.000-06:002017-11-14T06:18:25.487-06:00Unlearning what we learned in school<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwFuaHebINneL649rkbAb7pqve6s83Ha8Ddv64mDcr9q94ZO0vZ8MZbYRr0rWUjm0LuIb_VnOi93WWIlGZJnEXFM8lNdnC7p2-8nDorGcu-GY2XlIYZDJ66xYZMWlxA1WLOgak/s1600/Human-or-Animal-Cell-3D-Illustration.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwFuaHebINneL649rkbAb7pqve6s83Ha8Ddv64mDcr9q94ZO0vZ8MZbYRr0rWUjm0LuIb_VnOi93WWIlGZJnEXFM8lNdnC7p2-8nDorGcu-GY2XlIYZDJ66xYZMWlxA1WLOgak/s320/Human-or-Animal-Cell-3D-Illustration.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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I woke up yesterday morning to find my daughter sitting at the kitchen, reading her biology textbook. She had a test and was trying to cram all sorts of information into her head. While I made coffee, she sat there sighing.<br />
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Luca has talked a lot about how sucky her biology class is; how uninteresting and confusing. This morning, as she was hating on it, I asked her if I could look over what she's learning and tell it to her like a story instead of like facts. A measure of how frustrated she was: she said yes.<br />
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When I looked at the chapters she was learning, I wanted to weep. Forty pages on the cell, turning something magical into something that is dry as dirt. I looked throughout her textbook and remembered for the five millionth time: western science at the high school level turns the glory of life into something burdensome. It's part of the training ground that serves isolated individualism, as though any cell can experience itself outside the context of connection to the other.<br />
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After we had a fifteen minute conversation about the cell (which did NOT call the cell a factory like the textbook does), she asked if she could bring some of her classmates home every other week to just relearn what they are learning so that it's interesting. My mama-heart and Leo-heart and I LOVE BIOLOGY heart purred.<br />
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All life is connected. All life. Whether you believe in evolution or creation, whether you were raised with a traditional origin story or not, all life is connected. Trauma, from individual acts to collective systems passed down through history, is disconnection. The fact that disconnection exists does not contradict the fact that connection is here, too. <br />
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As I was leafing through Luca's textbook, I noticed that the chapters were arranged with an introductory chapter about life and protein followed by a small section on animals and then breaking the rest of the chapters into cellular life, cellular growth, cellular energy, reproduction, ecosystems, interdependence and then health and disease. How totally apocalyptic: the entirety of human life concluding with how we get sick. This is the conditioning that makes diagnosis and the drug industry possible.<br />
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If it really happens that Luca pulls together a group of school mates for mini-biology conversations in our house, this is how I am going to start: all life is connected. When you are reading chapters in your book about the differences between animals and plants and humans, you are reading more about the interests of the different mostly men and some women who are defined as "discovering" the principals of life. When your textbook says that cells were not discovered until after the microscope was invented in the 1500s and not really named as true until the 1800s, you are not learning the full story. You are not learning that traditions across the globe did not need to see through a microscope <a href="https://japingkaaboriginalart.com/articles/indigenous-endogenous-cell-biologists-aboriginal-art/">to have a felt sense or a sacred awareness</a> of the billions of personalities that organize themselves into organs and systems and energy tides and balances. Life is not invented or discovered. It is lived.<br />
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I am going to say to them, let's not learn this as cold hard facts with little walls around them. Instead, let's learn about this as poetry, something you feel, something that emerges insight and connection without having to trudge through it. And then let's listen to the life inside us while we are learning about the same life. Did you know that you have the capacity to feel/sense every single cell in your body? And that, like any other relationship, you can have conversations with them? Become aware of the communication that is happening all of the time and even ask questions to deepen your understanding of your own life? Right now, close your eyes or keep them open but bring yourself to whatever stillness feels possible right now. Imagine your ears are turning direction and rather than listening to your outside body, you are listening to your inside body. And then just ask, whisper to yourself, hey liver, show me yourself. Hey left femur, make yourself known. Hey energy of my blood, rise up and warm me. And then notice what happens. You might have feelings/thoughts about getting this right, a kind of conditioned anxiety that keeps you separate from yourself. If you do, try and ignore them. You can't get this wrong. Just say, hey stomach, I'm listening. Communication can happen in so many ways. You might feel a presence, a sense of something-ness around the area where your liver or femur or stomach are. You might feel a presence somewhere totally different. You might feel a temperature change, get an image, feel the urge to move, so many different ways of life expression. Don't worry about understanding, not right now. This is just a gentle touch in, like meeting that person you've heard about for years over social media but haven't actually met yet. Hello, I feel like I know you but I don't yet. Eye contact. Smile. And then comes the time for relationship to emerge.<br />
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The words don't matter, it's the intent behind them. Every aspect of your body that you whisper to is an aspect of yourself. This is the basic destruction of western science: life is taught of as something separate, an object, a mechanism. Your cell is not a factory, it is a living breathing intelligence. It is you, 52 trillion times over for 52 trillion cells. This is you. Each cell carries the same kind of complexity as each organ, as your body as a whole, as the planet that we live upon, as the galaxy we are part of. <a href="https://www.akpress.org/emergentstrategy.html">Adrienne Maree Brown</a> and others are talking about fractals as a way to experience organizing and change. This is what our life is: one element of an infinite fractal.<br />
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Your body, every single cell, has stories to tell you. Just like the person who lives next door and tells their family stories about your parking habits, habits that you've never noticed yourself. Or the person who used to serve your school lunch when you were in third grade, who remembers you vividly even though you will never know their name. And then hundreds of stories that are not directly about you but they cross your life, the woman who works as a parking attendant in the garage that you pass when you are walking to work. The two people who work for the park near you, keeping the grass cut and the sidewalk shoveled in winter, you don't know them and yet their life is directly connected to yours, every time you cross the street and step on that grass. It's a wide mass of complexity and connection that is more than you can track, whether you're talking about the people who are all of the aspects of your outside life, visibly and invisibly, or the cells that are all the aspects of your inside life, visibly and invisibly. Everything is connected.<br />
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What I will tell my daughter and her friends is that, in order to understand this complexity, western science has broken it down to a never ending table of parts. That is how we come up with the word for cell and for the aspects of the cell: the organelles, mitochondria and Golgi apparatus. Sexy words, huh? Listening to the different notes of music within a complex composition is not a bad thing. It's one way of experiencing and appreciating what happens when it all comes together. The problem is when all of the parts aren't ever, on their own terms, experienced all together. That is not how most science began. <a href="http://www.nativeamericanscience.org/courses/native-and-western-views-of-nature/indigenous-concepts-of-science/indigenous-concepts-of-science-ppt">Science that is indigenous</a> to this planet, that is native to the land upon which you now live, is the science of connection and relationship, not the science of parts. It's the science that quantum physicists and evolutionary biologists and ecologists are in the process of "rediscovering." It doesn't need to be rediscovered. It just needs to be lived. <br />
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Healers or people doing their work with a healing justice lens are creating the conditions for new stories to emerge. Or for old stories to be remembered: the whisper of a muscle fiber that carries the strain of bracing against the endless stream of police cars that slow down as they pass. The open and closedness of a cellular membrane that has figured out how to operate within the toxic soup of the nearby chemical plant. The hold on the bottom of the heart from a loss that hasn't yet been heard. This is what I will tell Luca and her friends when they come to talk about biology: it's all connected. All life is always connected. This is why it is not possible to heal alone as an isolated individual, we heal together. That's basic biology, even if it isn't how it's taught in high school.<br />
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<i>The image above is the representation of a cell, a eukaryotic cell which means a cell that has a nucleus around its DNA. Every cell, like every individual body, has a way to digest food, to poop out waste, to turn food into energy, to pump blood, and to learn in response to new information. This representation shows some of the parts of the cell. You can think of it in the same way you would see an image of human anatomy or of the anatomy of our planet.</i>Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-26838103265379154552017-11-10T01:14:00.000-06:002017-11-10T08:01:58.885-06:00What people ask us for when they are asking about healing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-8c8d0837-4afd-9e1c-3dd3-41007d15c8c8" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I am grateful to be a member of the <a href="http://www.peoplesmovementcenter.org/"><b>People's Movement Center</b></a>. Like incredibly grateful. It means that I get to be in relationship with other practitioners, with healers who are also deeply grounded in liberation and justice. We have conversations about healing justice. We also have conversations about how trauma shows up in the nervous system, about the difference between different healing traditions and how Chinese medicine has five seasons. We also have more mundane conversations like about how much money we have in the bank and how we can earn more income so that we can actually pay for a staff member.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">We've been around for slightly over three years and the majority of our work has expanded through relationship. This has meant that we are getting asked more and more often to do work with groups and organizations. In conversation, we are noticing that when people call us, they often can't exactly explain what they want. They just know they want us to do something about healing. People are calling because they have a felt sense of something. It's like they know that what they want is different from what they have - they can FEEL it - but they don't always have language to name it. It's one of the reasons why so many people are hungering to be involved with healing work.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Healers are all about patterns, right? We look for the connections between things, the places of expansion and contraction, in order to support those we work with to have more connection to their lives. So when people call us and we notice the pause that comes after, 'tell us what you mean by healing work," we start watching for patterns. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">First, a lot of people are calling and asking us about trauma. They want a mix of information and practices related to dealing with the impact of trauma on the nervous system, the role of trauma in development, and techniques for shifting the impact of present time and held trauma. At the PMC we are a collective of mostly people of color and indigenous people, of queer and trans identified people. The people who call us are also often POCI and queer and trans. And many want conversations about the connections between individual and collective trauma, between present and historical harm. People who call want to know about how to make these things visible within an organizational culture. They want tips for dealing with stress and anxiety and for frames that they can use to help navigate overwhelm. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The second biggest ask we get is for some kind of body-based, somatic, embodiment, spiritual and experiential practices. These are all concepts that seem to be pointing to something a similar ask or experience: ways to be together that aren't just about talking and thinking. They want somatic practices or somatic facilitation, someone who can help them shift their culture from <b>doing</b> work to <b>being within</b> work. They want help in coming up with their new strategic plan but doing it through movement and listening rather than just putting ideas on paper. People call wanting Theater of the Oppressed work, movement work, breathing before talking support. They want support for ceremony or ritual or a way to make what they are doing feel more sacred. These requests are what have made us get clear that sometimes the best healers are our magical facilitators who help people re-member themselves alone and together in groups. We see you facilitators!</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The third ask is directly for healing spaces. This is when people are having a retreat or want to gift their members or they have been through something intense and harsh and they want us to pull together a group of healers to hold a healing space. Sometimes these include skills sharing like leading everyone through breath work or a bodyscan and sometimes they are just about receiving.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What I was taught when I came in to this work and what I still believe is that healing justice is a lens, something that helps us to weave together histories and present time, to lift up cultural traditions and healing practices, to find ways to bring healing practitioners into movement spaces, and to work to ensure that everyone has access to culturally grounded integrative care and not only those who can afford it. When I look at what we are asked for at the PMC, I see these as sign posts for what we need to lift at this moment in time. They don't define healing justice work, but they are practices and conversations within it. And the focus or requests will change. They always do. As healers, our job is to keep listening for and tracking the patterns.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><i>The image the top of this blog post is a slide of heart cells. There is new research about the heart that says it is wrong to think of the heart as an organ that pumps blood. This research suggests that the heart actually slows blood down, helping it to pace itself so that the body can savor it. Everything we think we know and understand evolves. Always.</i></span></div>
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<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-40188731939933507512017-11-05T15:00:00.000-06:002017-11-05T15:00:16.021-06:00Gravity<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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From the minute sperm and egg meet, we are becoming. Each cellular shift is a kind of unfolding, an emerging within the fluid of the womb. For these first nine months, this is all we know. Fluid, in the beginning without clear boundary and, as we get closer to birth, fluid that is contained on all sides by a wall we can't yet cross.<br />
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Our first and earliest becoming is in the space of infinite possibility. That's what it means to grow within water. Every single direction is possible, all at the same time. We can lengthen and widen without coming against a boundary. And yet, because it is fluid, we also get the constant reassurance, light pressure against our emerging skin, that we are not alone. We are contained. Supported. Infinite space and complete containment, all at the same time.<br />
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Because this is all that we know, once we are born, the first reflex that kicks in* is the reflex that helps our body build a relationship with gravity. Try to think of it! No matter how we get out of the body, down through the birth canal or lifted up out of the abdomen, our tissues go from only knowing fluid to suddenly feeling the heavy relentless pull of gravity. Whether you believe in evolution or loving creation, it's the same thing: the first reflex that kicks in is one that helps our heart and lungs, blood vessels and lymph, and eventually intestines, muscles and bones, find their way to move against the demanding heaviness of a gravitational pull.<br />
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Reflexes are like those teachers that used to pop up on microsoft word when you first downloaded a new program. Remember the little paper clip with the startled expression that suddenly popped in to the lower right hand of your screen, asking you if you wanted help on formatting a document? Well, reflexes are like that, only less annoying. They pop up in the body at the appropriate time, giving a nudge to nerve endings which nudge muscles which means that suddenly, without being taught, the baby rolls over, lifts their head, starts doing the back and forth swimming movement that leads to crawling, reaches for the table and pulls themselves up, takes that first unsteady step that resolves into walking, and then learns to jump away from the gravity that holds its body down. Reflexes are made up of thousands of tiny concrete details that, over time, most <a href="https://susanraffo.blogspot.com/2017/10/how-we-talk-about-bodies-matters.html"><b>often although not always</b></a> come together in a body that, in jumping up to grab an apple off the highest branches, finds out how to move against gravity even as gravity continues supporting it.<br />
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As we develop and age, our bodies don't forget those reflexes. They are always there, ready to support a reboot, ready to remind the map of cells and awareness how it was that we started. To share with us again that first experience of coming into our own life, as something physically separate from the body that grew us within their womb.<br />
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I have never studied yoga. I do not know enough about the rich and complex history of its lineage, its teachings to explain why any particular pose or asana exists. But the first time I was invited to do shivasana, I immediately thought, look! It's the first reflex! Lying on the ground or sitting/leaning against any surface, soft and open, and being with our cells as they fall into and push against gravity.<br />
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Alright, in a second I'm going to ask you to put this down. To seriously put this blog down, even if your mind pops in and says, sure, sure, I'll do that after I finish reading this thing. Seriously, I want you to put your phone, laptop, tablet, whatever you got down on the table or the floor. I want you to bring your body to gravity and listen. If you are able, lie on your back on the floor, arms and legs relaxed and open, head supported and mouth gently open. If the floor is not an option for your body, then stay in our chair or lean your back against a wall, letting gravity support as much of you as you are physically able, and then just listen.<br />
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Do this now and then, after 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 or 30 depending on what feels right when you are there, come back to this page.<br />
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❤ 💙 💚 💛 💜 ❤ 💙 💚 💛 💜<br />
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What did you notice? What did you feel your body, this mix of fluid and membrane, do? Did you sink into the floor, chair or wall? Did your body pull away from the force, staying somewhat suspended, almost hovering just on top of the surface? Did your body sink down so far that you could barely pull yourself up, as though the surface overcame you and you felt like you disappeared? Did you notice emotions, physical sensations, a desire to move get stronger the longer that you stayed there? Was it impossible to notice anything because of how much your mind was chattering?<br />
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As you reflect over all of it, are you getting that "oh shit, I didn't do it right!" or some version of how you're not a good enough healer, person, life form because you couldn't still yourself for two minutes? Be wary, systems of supremacy have long ago found the cracks in the self care and mindfulness industries and have already shoved perfectionism and the protestant work ethic right down into its peacefully beating heart. It's managed to make "being present" another item on the to do list, one you can fail and or succeed at, meaning that your struggles are, again, all your fault. If that's coming up in you, then that's information. Notice how that old conditioning that best serves capitalism and not life has got into you.<br />
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Healing is about noticing what is here, right now. All of it, whether we like it or not. Sensing in and feeling noticing what is true at this moment. And then building enough space around what is true to be able to shift or change what comes next, if it serves your life or your kin's life better than what you were doing/being before. Bringing your body to gravity, or as close to gravity as you can get, is to intentionally let this first and very early relationship sniff around your life right now and share with you what it's experiencing. It lets this first early relationship with gravity help your cells remember themselves as they are and on their own terms.<br />
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Everything is information, including if the felt sense, the physical message that is rising up in you as soon as you bring your weight to gravity, is that it is not safe to rest. There is information here if trying to settle into weight makes every nerve ending in you scream that you have to get up and run. Bringing our body to this first reflex makes even more visible what our lives already know: what happens when we try to rest?<br />
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The <a href="https://susanraffo.blogspot.com/2017/10/what-do-i-mean-when-i-say-healing.html"><b>first part of healing is stopping the violence</b></a>. Always. That is true whether or not the violence is happening in the present moment or if the violence is held in the tissues, a moment in the past that hasn't yet settled. Coming to this first reflex lifts up just how much of that present or past violence is impacting our ability to rest. As a healer, I look at violence as a range of things including the US normative conditioning that says your worth is bound up with what you do and not who you are. No single one of us can be healed or free until all are healed and free. It is possible to stop the impact of the violence still held in your tissues by controlling the space you are in and having enough time to let your bodies very slowly and fully feel that space around you, like a scared mammal slowly sniffing its way into someplace new, sniffing to find a corner to curl up in that is hidden and quiet. It is also possible to stop the impact of that violence in your tissues by being raised with a range of race, class and gender privileges so that your conditioning numbs you and you can't feel the violence even when it is loud and screaming right outside your window. The first is about creating healing spaces. The second is about living your own life at the expense of others. Both of these scenarios are about violence that needs healing.<br />
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Coming to our first relationship with gravity, whether we do it by ourselves and for our individual bodies, or we do it as part of a group, it is always about taking a moment to listen, to integrate without thinking, and to notice what is true. Right now. In this moment.<br />
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And like all things, this is about practice. (Go ahead, I know you read that and want to lie down again. Go ahead and do it and then come back. This blog piece is almost done.)<br />
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We can't build a practice of rest if we don't know how to rest. This is the place of contradiction, the wrapped up tight knot that generations of living within and overriding violence have created. It is very difficult, although not impossible, to bring our body's to gravity's weight if we don't believe we can let go of our weight. That we can rest.<br />
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The gift of this is that gravity is not going anywhere. For the rest of your life and beyond, gravity is going to be this living relational thing that is with you, wherever you are. It was there to greet you immediately upon being born and, after you pass, it will help pull your body down and back into your most basic elements. It is always here. Always. And remembering your, our relationship to it is something you can do on your own or, even better, something you can do with others. Nothing I am writing here is new. Instead, this is all ancient and so many healers and teachers across literally thousands of years have practiced what it means to bring a body back into its ability to rest. Rest is how life remembers itself, reflects over what it has learned and slowly remakes itself in response to that learning. All of this is why systems of supremacy hijack the body's survival responses, keeping our nervous systems at the ready for disaster. Unable to rest.<br />
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I wish for you the ability to rest. I wish for you, no matter what has happened in your life or is happening now, the space and time, for five seconds or five hours, to remember this first and very loyal relationship. Right now. As I finish writing this blog, I will practice. My daughter and partner are both still asleep. It is cold enough outside that the windows are shut so this room is quiet and contained. I will practice with and for you, remembering gravity, and wishing its patient steady pull as a kindness that only wants to hold your bones so that you are contained, held still, not falling into space or falling apart.<br />
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* This isn't exactly how the study of developmental reflexes names this first reflex. They focus more on what the set of specific reflexes moves towards. I am grateful to my teacher Suzanne River, who has since passed, for how she taught these reflexes as a series of reflexes and movements within the larger reflexes.Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-81608780470082425492017-11-03T17:47:00.000-05:002017-11-03T17:47:30.050-05:00healing justice, grief and children<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I spent last evening with a group of people who were in ceremony, in practice, honoring the dead from a range of traditions, being intimate with the concrete truth of death and with the bodies that death has already claimed. This is new to me. I experienced a lot of death as a child. We went to funerals (sometimes) and told stories about the person who died in those immediate months after their passing (sometimes) but we did not practice intimacy with death.<br />
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My daughter was there at the ceremony last night. She's 15 and has her own life and privacy so I won't give too many details except this: for the first time in her life she had the experience of grieving a recent (violent) death within a circle of intimate strangers and feeling that transformation that happens when heaviness around death turns to something different, more connected, less isolating. I watched this happen and wondered what it is like to experience this for the first time at 15 as opposed to 54 or 3. I watched this happen and placed it in the context of the next story.<br />
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As we were telling stories about those who had passed, one woman, a friend, began to talk about a grandmother, a woman who does not know how to show the love she might feel in her heart. This friend talked about her grandmother's emotional distance and about the impact of this on my friend's feelings about her grandmother's eventual death. Then my friend said something that touched everyone in the room: she reflected on the chain of broken relationships, about what happens when a parent is not able to show their love to their child, that raw steady unconditional love. She noticed what this child does - and doesn't learn - and then what happens when this child becomes the parent and again, does not know how be that deep steady resource for their child's living. And on and on again, this line of grief and disconnection that becomes culture, family and the marker for what a person can most expect from the world around them.<br />
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That reflection visited my in my dreams last night: a parade of families, of adults stepping up and showing themselves, showing the reasons for why that deep steadiness of love might have disappeared. This really is one of the ways that supremacy and oppression hijacks the body's survival responses. We live to love. Period. We are here to feel and deepen connection with ourselves, each other, the land and spirit around us. Last night I remembered every attack that supremacy has used to isolate and destroy children within their families, from <a href="https://susanraffo.blogspot.com/2017/10/dealing-with-original-wounds.html"><b>the original wounds</b></a> of attempted genocide and the institution of slavery, to every act of deportation, incarceration and forced migration, every moment of unsupported poverty and normalized sexual and physical violence. I will say this over and over again until I hear us saying it everywhere: every time someone's deep-rooted relationships, long evolved languages and cultural traditions are force-taken away, it becomes harder for the kin network to make sure the children are safe. It becomes harder and sometimes impossible for elders to pass along the steady grounded stories that tell the children who they are and why they are here on this planet. This kind of certain safety and story telling is part of the chemistry of unconditional love. No single one of us should have to figure out for ourselves the meaning and experience of our life upon this planet or to be watching, alone and moment by moment, to make sure our bodies are safe.<br />
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The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_Childhood_Experiences_Study"><b>ACE study</b></a> uses research to prove what all of us know by instinct: if you do not protect the children and keep them safe, then they will be hurt and that hurt will translate to many kinds of pain in their later lives. All of the ways that adults are not able to care for and sometimes are violent towards the children in their care, this generational chain of harm, is at the root of each child who grows up to be an adult who causes harm to their own body and the bodies of others.<br />
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One of my teachers talks about the difference between targeted trauma and matrix trauma. Targeted trauma is when a specific act happens to your individual body: you are in a car accident, you experience a racist attack, you are physically violated. These are targeted acts against your body that have a beginning and an end (in the concrete sense, not in the experience of their impact). Matrix trauma is what never ends; it's the ongoing everyday seems-almost-like-the-air-you-breathe systemic attack. The constancy of this is like a slow burn erosion of a person's - and community's - internal clarity about the importance of their own life and connection to others. All systems of oppression are a form of matrix trauma: ableism, white supremacy, patriarchy, homo- and transphobia. They are always there, working to constrict the expansiveness of individual and collective life. Tightening it. Policing it. Controlling it. Matrix trauma can sometimes be invisible, can feel like culture. We say it's just how we do things forgetting that how we do things evolved so that we could survive. This is what happens when the intensity of trauma gets embedded in our kin networks and then passed forward from one generation to the next.<br />
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There are multiple forms of cultural trauma that have impacted how children are raised. My friend, who is multiracial raised white, was talking about hers: this emotional disconnection between adults and children that freezes the loving heart, which will protect children when it's in response to protecting the stories the family tells about themselves, but will not protect or even see when the harm is coming from those who are supposed to be there to protect and care for them. This is the trauma which, within the cycle of violence, turns to perpetration and such are systems of supremacy maintained.<br />
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What does it mean that, outside of culturally-grounded and connected space, our movements are largely absent of children? I see portable babies in movement spaces, lives that are still in the enmeshment stage with their adult and so are held tight against the body, nursing or bottle feeding or sleeping on one lap after another. This is beautiful and right. I see far fewer children who are at the question asking stage, the interrupting, slow things down, let's play stage. Around age 2 or 3, they start to disappear from many and possibly most places of (non-culturally rooted) movement work. My question isn't just a form of inclusion politics, it's a question about how we imagine and experience community. And my asking is a form of linking arms with everyone reading this and looking at the question together. Even as a parent who has that special eye contact moment with other parents when organizing spaces are so obviously not centering the fact of children, I don't always know how to do this differently.<br />
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This is what happens when we don't do this work differently; the children disappear. And things happen when the children disappear - from mild disregard to deep and dangerous violence. That wound of separating families, of professionalizing or formalizing spaces, of putting the care of the children into a different category from the care of the communities: it continues forward, a kind of culture that was at one point the best way someone knew how to survive.<br />
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I had an experience at Standing Rock that has impacted me forever on all of this. Irna Landrum does an incredible job of <a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/11/1/1589695/-Stories-from-Standing-Rock-how-YOU-can-keep-the-Black-Snake-out-of-our-water-You-can-t-drink-oil"><b>describing what happened</b></a>, but the bare details are this: all of us at the camp were awakened in the middle of the night to be part of a potential search party for a little girl who was missing (quick assurance: the little girl was found safe and ok). All of us, a moment in the camp when that meant hundreds and hundreds, maybe even thousands of us. We all got up, not knowing exactly what was happening, wondering if we were being raided, and went to wait on the road. While we were waiting, a white woman standing next to us complained about being awoken when people weren't sure if the child was actually missing. "Why couldn't they wait and wake us up when they knew for sure?" she asked. Many of us turned to her and said versions of, "I would rather be woken up for a false alarm than not being woken up and have that child turn up hurt." We were sleepy and not sure what was happening but many of us, including myself, were shocked into being awake by that white woman's question.<br />
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I want to live where I can assume that you are going to come and bang on my door when your or someone else's child is missing - or your grandmother or the person you never met who lives alone at the corner but there are now three days of mail sticking out of his mailbox. This is the normal that I want. It matters so much that my daughter, even just now at age 15, got to experience grief as a collective held and normalized thing, to not let the fact of a violent death go unwitnessed and uncared about. It shifted what happens after, and not just for her but for the small ones that she might someday be in relationship with. Healing justice is many things but to me, it's also about creating the conditions that support the deep shifting of unfinished survival histories that are held within the tissues of our physical selves and the tissues of our shared cultures. It's about remembering the descendants, not as someday concepts but as real live breathing small people who are tugging on our pant's legs and asking us to remember them, play with them, keep them safe from harm.<br />
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<i>Written in deep care of so many of the adults I know who are living with and caring for small children every single day, theirs and others, while also working to pay the bills and working to change the world. All at the same time.</i><br />
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<br />Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-13893290397264380852017-11-02T11:58:00.000-05:002017-11-02T13:01:46.566-05:00Loving the bones<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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If your people are originally from the northern hemisphere, then this is an important time for you. Across the north, as the earth is moving from hot to cold, festivals, ceremonies and teachings exist that celebrate light's relationship to darkness, that celebrate the line between life and death, that honor the harvest time before the freezing or death time. This is, like all time, a sacred time.</div>
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Across my family lines, we alternately know this time, really this particular day, November 2, as All Saint's Day, a Catholic recreation of the older rituals. Some of those earlier rituals still linger. My family lines have celebrated il Giorno dei Morti*, the Day of the Dead, a celebration that still exists in Italy although it is slowly disappearing under the US mass marketing of Halloween. We have celebrated Winternacht, one of the three great blessings in the Norse year, the time of honoring the dead, similar to Samhain. We also know this time as the time between the Freezing Moon and the Little Spirit Moon, the Ojibwe calendar that knows this as a time of living close to the spirits, a healing time. And so many other festivals and traditions whose names we don't remember. I did not grow up with any of these but I am learning to claim them now.</div>
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All of these lines and traditions know about the power of bones. And oh how I love bones! Sacred bones, glorious bones. There is a big difference between living bones and the dead bones that we usually get to see and hold. Living bone is this glorious mix of fluid and hardness, something that holds its shape but also can flow. Bone is flexible, it contracts in response to pressure and then it expands when that pressure leaves. Bones are where we keep the stardust, those extraterrestrial parts of ourselves, magnesium, calcium, cystalline structures that emerged within the intense heat and pressure of a star and which, eventually, move through space to fall like rain on the planets, on us. That stardust is part of the material that creates many parts of our bodies but especially our bones. We build ourselves up out of the materials of the lands where we live: the food we eat, the water we drink, the bits and pieces of organic and inorganic matter that find their way into us because we breathe, we touch things, we are alive. </div>
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Oh magnificent bones. When we die, most of our flesh turns back into earth, mixing in with all other organic matter as soil. Our bodies are - mostly - no longer recognizable. This is true whether we burn, are lifted high on bowers for the sun, rain and birds to feast upon, or whether we are placed under the ground so that the microbes of the soil can take us apart. All that remains recognizable are our bones. Over time, even when the shape of the bones disappear, still the magnesium and calcium, the zinc and chromium and so many other minerals remain. They are constant, both within our bones and when we have passed, as part of the earth, of the bodies of other living beings that emerge again, one generation after the next. </div>
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Many of our traditions show reverence for the bones of those we have loved. Many traditions wash the bones, bring the bones out when it is time to speak with the ancestors, redden the bones, make rattles and horns from the bones, love them, know them, listen to the bones for divination, set the bones down at table for meals with us, bring the bones and make sure they travel from old homes to new.</div>
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While I write this, I am baking bone cookies with a Sicilian friend. We are making four different kinds and will give some away as gifts and will put some on our altars and will enjoy the rest, letting the crunchy sweetness melt on our tongues. All of the cookies are made to be hard, crunchy, not cookie-like but bone-like until we eat them and they change. One recipe surprised us because after baking, the cookie separated, the inner softness pushing through a hard white crispy shell, like marrow pushing through the hard body.</div>
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The bones are the infrastructure of the body. They developed to support the fluid-filled bag that is the rest of us. With the bones, we can move. The bones help us push off against gravity. They are the constant around which our fluid body organizes itself. On this day I think of our ancestors as the same kind of infrastructure, the constant thread that comes forward from a dizzying number of generations. Knowing them, staying in relationship to them, we can move. Without them, we flop around in our present time, tilting back and forth in response to earthquakes and other external movement, but not carrying our own guide rope back to gravity.</div>
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<i>This image is from the catacombs underneath Naples, Italy, about sixty miles from the villages where my father's maternal line lived for generations upon generations.</i></div>
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* Hey all you Italians and Sicilians, just because our people also celebrated remembering the dead at this time of year and called it Day of the Dead (in Italian and Sicilian) does not give us license to then celebrate Dia de los Muertos. They are not the same honoring. They have different indigenous traditions embedded in both and different histories of colonization on top of each. And since, if your people like mine came to the US and then traded language history and culture for whiteness, this adds another layer of "don't do it!" It is vital that raised white folks reclaim culture and tradition outside of whiteness. It is also vital that while this happens, white folks are working fierce and fast to end white supremacy - in your bodies as well as within systems and cultures. Tread carefully and with deep passion and conviction.</div>
<br />Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-57835667757957797392017-10-30T15:39:00.000-05:002017-10-31T09:20:18.748-05:00A midwestern POCI conversation about healing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Place matters. All action is local, even when it is sent through the internet to be a national or global initiative. It's local because we experience it locally. In our bodies. It matters deeply that I am from the midwest - started on the eastern edge of the midwest in Ohio and have ended up here on the western edge, in Minnesota. The feel of this land, its seasons, what its food and water carries into my body, the fact that it is already in the 30s today, cold and dark early: these are what forms me. Where you are is what forms you. <br />
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I am resharing this conversation here, although I've already shared it through Facebook. I am sharing it here and prefacing it with place because the 23 indigenous and POC healers and healing practitioners who are talking on its pages also live here, on the Dakota homelands, in Minneapolis and St. Paul. These are people close to my heart, some of whom are in my everyday life. We all live here, on this land, right now. And that matters.<br />
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The focus of this conversation was on how to support leaders of color and indigenous leaders, people who are often working in toxic spaces where their leadership is under attack, where they are under-resourced and where the weight of white supremacist systems and organizations makes the work of liberation feel sometimes close to impossible. The question that <a href="http://nexuscp.org/"><span style="color: blue;"><b>Nexus</b></span></a> wanted us to sit with was to better understand how healing can happen within these spaces.</div>
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I am resharing <a href="http://nexuscp.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Healing-report_for-print-FINAL-6.19.17.pdf"><b><span style="color: blue;">the report</span></b></a> that came out of that conversation here, when we are on the cusp of an election. Many of you are involved in some kind of voter work. Many more of you are impacted by what happens at these elections. And no matter what, shifting power at the electoral level is important but it isn't about healing. It can, however, set the conditions that allow the potential for healing to increase or decrease.</div>
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So I share these words with you because, well, we all need words that make us dream bigger. Feel free to share with me what you have read and written. This is a conversation. Trauma is disconnection. So how can healing, re-connection or connection for the very first time, happen right now. Here.<br />
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<i>The image above is of a single nerve cell, something that doesn't really exist because a nerve cell only exists in its relationship to the other cells around it. And yet it also does. A single nerve cell can shift how communication is happening within the body. It is powerful. And yet a single nerve cell depends on the communication that happened before and after, its role in change is only about those who came before and those who came after. A single nerve cell.</i></div>
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<br />Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-83671551666902997832017-10-28T15:44:00.000-05:002017-11-06T13:05:27.171-06:00Dealing with the original wounds<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiapR72MagknYbqt1-3mOZxE3uF3qi6fQprx3ohRjJt3sWaXMCFmDRTpv8A4NLWRDyGE92ykhiK9m-Ct41JpiytJuMgXQIKs1c9uxQtm3rT8WPQ_W6ad-w-aAy3buAsZVarOaIn/s1600/12745503_10154633239334698_7746250884557019971_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="343" data-original-width="493" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiapR72MagknYbqt1-3mOZxE3uF3qi6fQprx3ohRjJt3sWaXMCFmDRTpv8A4NLWRDyGE92ykhiK9m-Ct41JpiytJuMgXQIKs1c9uxQtm3rT8WPQ_W6ad-w-aAy3buAsZVarOaIn/s320/12745503_10154633239334698_7746250884557019971_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-79b7e818-4af9-dea4-8c20-4d429c06e875" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This is not a trigger warning, but it is an invitation that you pay attention to yourself. I am going to talk about the violence that is the foundation of the creation of the United States. It is easy to read history and turn it into information: something that a person “knows” and “understands.” Please don’t do that. Everything written here is about real people; people like you and your kin. What is written here might be about your kin or your people might be the kin who were committing the violence. Either way, notice yourself as you read. Listen deeply, listen to how your ancestors might whisper to you through your DNA, through your spirit. Read this as a prayer, not a school lesson. And then breathe.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span></b><br />
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I just finished taking a walk along the Mississippi River. The leaves are mostly fallen, the sumac is bright red, and the ancient cottonwoods loom large along the riverside. I usually walk near Coldwater Spring, a sacred Dakota site that has been taken over and domesticated by the park service, and along the river just north of Fort Snelling. I never go there without remembering where I am and what happened at that place. I never go there without remembering that eight generations ago, there was no Fort and this was only Dakota land. I never go there without remembering the 1600 Dakota families who were interred at the Fort after and during the Dakota war, only six generations ago. I go there and remember the expulsion of the Dakota people from their homelands, still six generations ago, all of these actions taken by President Lincoln within months of his signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.</span></b><br />
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As a bodyworker who studies craniosacral therapy and learns from other modalities, I know that if you can identify the original wound, the first significant hurt, and if you can support that original wound to get what it needs to transform, then many of the things that happened afterwards will transform at the same time. I have seen that kind of unwinding, this moment of deep healing, within the cells and tissues of people who invite me to be with them. Held trauma is a moment of unfinished history. Life wants to come back to the present moment, to feeling connected to other life. This means that held trauma will find a way to resurface again and again until it is finished. This is why a person seems to get involved with the same kind of person, the same boss and situation at work, the same feeling of isolation and sadness. Until we can heal or shift the original conditioning or experiences, we will get tangled up in the same tangles. </span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The same is true of what happens to the collective body. I believe that for those of us who live on this land, there are two significant original wounds. These wounds overlay a whole range of histories that we have separately brought as people coming from many different places but when we settle here, on these lands, then we settle in relationship to the original wounds.</span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The first wound is the attempted genocide of those people indigenous to this land. For over 500, 5000, some peoples say 50,000 generations there were people who lived on these lands. They moved and migrated like people do, from one ocean to the other, from the south to the north and the north to the south. Real people who did all of the glorious and absurd things that real people do, who had wars and who got sick and died and who lived contented lives, real people who never lost their relationship to the land. Real people who understood - and understand - that we are the land and the land is us. The first wound happened when Europeans brought their wounds to this land and planted them. Those wounds were the wounds of disconnection from land and the idea of land ownership. Their wounds included the idea of profit, something that is not possible without inequality. They included rigid and specific gender assumptions that subjugated anything seen as feminine and they included a patriarchal and transcendent God who expected harsh discipline and service from his followers. These were the wounds that had evolved in western Europe for thousands of years. In their European homelands, people were (and are still) fighting for a connected life that does not depend on violent inequality at its base. Many of those who first crossed the ocean to come to this land came because they wanted to find a place where they could live more spiritually grounded simple lives. But even those who came seeking heaven on earth came bringing their own original wounds, this deep disconnection from life, and they carried it like a virus as they built their farms and towns and expanded across the land. This is the first original wound: the attempted and unceasing disappearance of the original people of this land through murder, forced assimilation, land theft, and cultural policing and minimization. </span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The second original wound came soon after first contact with these lands. This was the wound that enabled those who settled to increase their profits and to feel justified in doing so. First the land was turned into an object to be sold and used for personal purpose and second, human beings were turned into objects to be sold and used for personal purpose. The second wound is the institution of slavery, the economic system that depended on the creation of race as a way to organize the complexity of life. The European system of slavery or the owning of people has its roots in European feudalism, anti-Semitism and the colonizing mix of the Catholic inquisition and crusades. The way the institution of slavery developed in the Americas is born of these histories with each colonizing country putting the pieces together slightly differently. This second original wound is entwined with the first; both together creating the foundation of the creation of the United States: indigenous disappearance and the violent policing of anti-Black racism. The institution of slavery had already been started in the islands and lands to the south of us. This means that as Europeans first started coming north to settle and colonize, they brought with them enslaved Africans. The first settler’s legal code, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, legalized slavery in the colonies. After the Bacon Rebellion, a shared fight by Black slaves and Black and white indentured servants only two generations after the first large scale settlement in the East, race rather than class became the tool for social control. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">When you attend to an original wound, are not distracted by all of those things which show up at the same time, you increase the potential for transformation. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">There are many other wounds that exist here on these lands: gender oppression and classism and ableism and religious persecution and anti-immigrant hatred and all kinds of phobias. But they are not the original wounds of this land. Most flavors of US-based class and gender oppression have European roots, not indigenous or the many different kinds of Asian or African cultural roots. Forms of gender and class based oppression might well exist in those lands, but upon settling here, in the United States, those other homegrown inequalities merged with the European form of cultural divide. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The one thing all of us share who are living on this land that is now called the United States is the experience of being raced. This is true whether we are new immigrants or our people have been here since first contact. This is also true for those who are indigenous to this land but it doesn’t quite work the same way. Being native to this land exists before race and so identities like Lakota or Ojibwe or Cree are cultural experiences that exist before they were raced. Being raced means having the complexity of your history, your culture, and your understanding of yourself and your kin aligned with a category that you have no power to shift. The only people who get to experience life without the awareness of being raced are white people. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">White supremacy, I believe, is a system of coddling European-descended people so that they don’t have to feel the impact of the wounds they brought with them over the ocean and then transplanted directly and indirectly into this land and into people’s bodies. White supremacy is a system set up to maintain these original wounds so that they are raw and bleeding, never able to heal and then transform into something new. White supremacy exists so that European-descended people don’t have to experience the profound contradiction between the life they are leading and the values they claim to hold.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">To me, healing justice is about directly addressing these original wounds. Period. This means healing justice seeks to stop the violence of these histories as they show up in the present day, including in how newer immigrants are defined through the lens of anti-Black racism and anti-indigeneity or with the added layers that are defined in relationship to US global economic interests. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As healers and healing practitioners, we work most of the time with individual bodies. Life shows up in healing spaces in very local ways: as an experience of pain, of emotion, of disconnection, of compromised movement or energy. We are there in response to how the truth of someone’s life shows up in any given moment. This is healing. What makes it healing justice is how we hold the truth of the present moment within the larger context of the original wound. How we do this is part of what I will keep reflecting on in this blog.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I want to be clear about one more thing: paying attention to the original wound does not mean ignoring the real pain of gender and class and all other forms of oppression and violence. But it does mean still and always paying attention to the original wound. There is no gender or class liberation possible on this land without attending to the original wounds. Without attending to and healing the origins, other fights will eventually become aligned one way or another with white supremacy. It matters deeply that profound class divisions, sexual violence and rigid gender binaries did not exist on this land prior to colonization. They are not native to this land. They were brought here and transplanted, just like a Monsanto seed, fighting its way into the reproductive cells of native seeds as they are transformed against their will. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><i>Beneath all of what I wrote here is the foundational hurt: the one that these histories made possible and maintain. Beneath all of this is our separation from the life that sustains us. This land, right here, below our feet. The kin who are within arm's and heart's reach. How we experience the connection of all things, spirit, life. And the ancientness of our selves, our ancestors joining hands along our DNA. Notice your breath. Right now.</i></span></div>
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<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><i></i><br />Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-21376598649267158532017-10-26T11:30:00.002-05:002017-10-30T11:07:25.520-05:00How we talk about bodies matters<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><i>Because I am restarting this blog to talk about healing justice, I am starting with some fundamental pieces that feel, for me, like the underbelly foundation in how we hold this work. They are not offered as the capital T "truth" but rather like poetry, like ceremony, like song. I want to be in conversation with you, with the connection of all life. I am most interested in how these words resonate in your life, in your body, in how you experience your breath.</i></span></b><br><br><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">We didn’t ask for it. We didn’t create it, but it’s true. Every time we talk about bodies and healing, we are in relationship to histories and beliefs about what is normal and what is not. These histories and beliefs carry invisible assumptions as heavy as gravity. </span></b></div>
<p><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br></b><span style="color: black; font-family: arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline;">Many of our people had some belief or practice that saw their kin with different physical bodies or different ways of expressing or different experiences of their senses as evil or possessed by spirits or a danger to the community as a whole. Not all of our people believed this. Some saw those who were different as gifts, as beings in closer relationship to the sacred. But those European histories that first colonized this land and created the mainstream beliefs that define healthcare and religion and politics come from histories of torturing, killing or separating those who were seen as physically, emotionally or mentally different. It wasn’t and isn’t only European histories that had violent ways of dealing with difference. For the purpose of talking about culture in the US, I am writing here about Eurocentrism but please learn and know your own histories. Very few of us come from people who knew how to love radical difference within our intimate spaces, even before we were colonized.</span></p>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As scientific ways of thinking began to define European culture in the 1800s, this added a new layer of defining the body. Now the science of anatomy, of medicine, of health and wellness began to define “normal” and “abnormal” and to create public policies for managing society along these lines. Who was and is defined as normal shifted over time but most often it included people with physical impairments including cognitive differences, gender non-conforming people, those seen as delinquent or deviant or criminal, and those who are raced as not white. Eugenics developed along with the theory of evolution as a respected science focused on creating the “perfect” race.</span></b></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">This is not a history that is finished. The collective trauma of murdering our own kin because someone defines them as inferior is unfinished and shows up again and again as policies that define any person as diseased and therefore not worth having control over the meaning of their own life. This includes how conversations about assisted suicide unfold, racialized beliefs about who is more violent and who is smarter and who is more generous, how healthcare policies are defined and how healthcare expenses are treated, how accessibility to public and private spaces is supported or dismissed, the obsession with super fit bodies, making assumptions about gender and experience based on the genitalia or our perception of the body in front of us, the use of the words crazy or insane or foolish to dismiss anyone you disagree with, the invisibility of mental health struggles, the assumption of a certain kind of neurotypical cognitionl, the physical and mental and emotional assumptions made in movement spaces where liberatory political work demands long hours of physical and mental energy, and in every space where people talk about healing.</span></b></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I have heard many different healers use words like “whole” when referring to where someone’s body needs to be. I have heard many healers talk with community members about the outcomes of doing healing work: feeling better, feeling more connected, being stronger, better, faster, just like Superman. I struggle with this whenever I talk about healing - and usually try to only talk about trauma as disconnection and healing as connection - and to then be clear that what connection feels like is defined by the person who wants to heal and NOT by anyone else.</span></b></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Eli Clare talks about much of this in his book, </span><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29771370-brilliant-imperfection" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. If you identify as a healer or healing practitioner, read this. Now. Assume that even as you are doing powerful work in support of the person you show up for, you are also re-entrenching a history of ableism that slides its way into every sentence that you speak, every assumption that you make. All trauma is collective and as people who care about healing justice, we don’t get to claim our own work as healers without directly attending to disability justice.</span></b></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><br></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">There is work to do. Deep work that is dealing directly with how histories of violence are held in the cells of the body. There is also deep work to do about not holding on to what the idea of transformation or liberation looks like. There is deep work to do as healers about not assuming what is normal or valuable and what is not. And there is deep work to do about separating the many different ways that a life experiences itself and allowing that life to define for itself and within relationship to its chosen communities how it wants to define healing.</span></b></div><p><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I make mistakes every single day. In the morning before I practice and when I pray, I ask for help in showing up in the best way that honors the sovereignty of the individual and collective lives in front of me while also working to stop the histories that negatively impact their sense of possibility. As healers or people committed to healing justice, let’s spend the rest of our lives doing a better job of not getting in their way because of the violent histories about wellness and bodies that inform the very practices that we use in support of their liberation. </span></b></div>
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<i>The image at the top of this page is of a slime mold, the first multicellular reproductive organisms or our shared first mother. When a slime mold is split into parts, it finds its ways back to reform together. And when a slime mold learns, it learns instantaneously, outside of linear time.</i></b><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><i></i></p>
Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com4Minneapolis, MN, USA44.977753 -93.26501080000002744.7980145 -93.587734300000022 45.1574915 -92.942287300000032tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-7662052614547158082017-10-01T12:43:00.006-05:002017-11-06T13:03:39.452-06:00Starting againAs you can tell by looking after this post, I am restarting this blog. I want a place to reflect on the lens of healing justice, on liberation work and time.<br />
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It's not surprising to me that I started this blog and then left it about ten years ago. It's kind of the rhythm of parenting and middle life. When your children are small, you have less time in some ways and more time in others. When they get older, it all shifts. I stopped this blog when life became too full for reflection. I am restarting it when my child is in high school. I am restarting it on the other side of middle age. If the circle of community were not broken, then it would be natural that I start to reflect on the things my life has taught me. There would be times when we sat together and I got to tell stories, as well as listen to stories from those around me. <br />
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Sadly, we don't live that way. And so the vanity part of this blog is that god damn it, I still want to sit by the fire and tell stories. Think out loud and, if I am lucky, have you listen.<br />
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And the other vanity part of this says, hey, we talked about things differently ten years ago. I also understood myself differently ten years ago. There are things I say, political language I use, and how I identify that isn't exactly the same. But there you go... change is real. God is change. And so I am just gonna leave it all.<br />
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<br />Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-25898756380936470722017-10-01T12:34:00.000-05:002017-10-01T12:34:10.858-05:00A follow up letter to Gary Schiff<div class="_2cuy _3dgx _2vxa">
Because so many of you read the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/notes/susan-raffo/an-open-letter-to-gary-schiff/10154883367790119?comment_id=10154892134120119&reply_comment_id=10154894497595119&notif_t=note_comment&notif_id=1486581876778383">first letter</a>, I am including this response to the conversation about the letter that took place on the <a data-lynx-mode="origin" href="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fforums.e-democracy.org%2Fgroups%2Fmpls-poho%2Fmessages%2Ftopic%2F4Y4xpDiiSEtTFMQQKbtz9E&h=ATPNIWqR3zOMut5YLZdbWC2aiubSNGz3NGifEfDg7fzt4QriWR8nwcQ45jQiRkCMcFpOvQMwbvXShTR4cOz32b2GR4obdL3tih3u-d9uUSgW7SHNnBfbVLu5fpP7MVOR4HN2k0iByFU" target="_blank">e-democracy list</a> for Powderhorn Park.</div>
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Hey neighbors,</div>
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I’ve taken some time just to read your responses on the e-democracy listserv and listen without jumping in and commenting on each point. Some of what I’ve heard in what you’ve written includes concerns about limiting democracy or concerns about political leaders being asked to run or not run based on their race. Some of you have also voiced frustration with how Councilmember Cano has or hasn’t shown up and responded to calls. And then others shared moments of agreement with points I raised in my letter.</div>
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I started the letter by naming it as a love letter. It still is. I agree with each of you who shared any concerns about limiting how democracy operates by any kind of exclusion including race. The vision of democracy has got to be a place where any person can enter, offer to represent a constituency and then be in real conversation with that constituency so that we can decide whether or not they represent us. This is the ideal and I feel fiercely about it.</div>
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Which is why my letter to Gary was a spiritual letter or a moral letter or a values letter before it was anything else. It’s why it started with love because this letter feels, to me, like reaching out to kin to say, hey! I see you. I have heard you share your values with us for a lot of years and I am telling you, this feels like a contradiction in your values.</div>
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We all act in ways that contradict our core values from time to time. Such is the way of living in a complex world. Such is the way of living alongside structures of deep oppression and colonization. I act in contradiction all of the time and, when I do, I trust the people I am in relationship with to lovingly and responsibly hold me accountable. For example, my partner read the final version of my letter after it had been published. She laughed and said, “ Yeah, Susan, so you are talking about racial justice but look at what you did at exactly the same time! You ended your letter by implying that 19 year olds are immature!”</div>
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OOf! Right there. In my push to write about racial justice, I inscribed an assumption about age and maturity that I don’t actually believe. Contradiction.</div>
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I blustered for a minute, “well, I didn’t mean that… “ with all of the self-defensive posturing that always seems to come up most intensely with my partner who I love and trust. And then I took a deep breath and said, “Crap. You’re right. “ Because she was. There are way too many 19 year olds who out-mature a lot of the 50 somethings like me. My partner knows me. She knows my values (hi Rocki!). The ending sentence of my letter contradicted the values I hold and I needed someone to show that to me. Period.</div>
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Our experience tells us that institutions such as schools, courts and the media are negatively biased towards indigenous people, people of color and immigrants. Data and research proves that experience again and again. It is a contradiction in our core values if we then refuse to do the work of changing those system, both in the intimate individual moments and at a larger scale. When people who have access to the benefits of these systems compete for public resources and electoral positions on platforms that name equity as a value, it is a contradiction to then take away the leadership and power of people of color and marginalized people who are fighting for justice. In doing this, we repeat the violence and inequality of the systems that got us here. This is not simply an individual misstep. It is the remaking of a collective wrong. When someone who benefits from unequal systems runs against someone who does not, we face a collective spiritual contradiction. A morals and values contradiction. It happens. It doesn’t make someone a bad person. Naming it isn’t an attack or a performance. It’s just an act of being in accountable relationship. It’s how we hold each other accountable within love and community. </div>
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That’s what I’m doing right now with you, Gary. I’m just looking at you and saying, “Hey there, neighbor. You can do this differently. What does it mean for you to recognize the complexity of how power and access has impacted the political system and then make a personal moral choice to engage with that history differently?”</div>
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I would still love to sit down with you, just the two of us, and talk about this. Because these are, to me, the hard moral and spiritual choices that reach towards the potential for a new and different world where democracy becomes a practice of love and community and agency and reparations and justice and possibility… and perhaps even freedom.</div>
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Warmly, even though it’s cold in our ward today,</div>
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Susan Raffo</div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-2699468641682270562017-10-01T12:32:00.001-05:002017-10-01T12:32:27.661-05:00An open letter to Gary Schiff<div class="_2cuy _3dgx _2vxa">
Gary,</div>
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First, you might not know it, but this is a love letter, a letter of hope in the way that hope lives in the places where we hold each other accountable, ask the hard questions, and tell the truth about disappointment. So I am writing this letter to you, because I am disappointed. I am completely open to talking about this after you have received it.</div>
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Last weekend, you publicly announced you were running for City Councilmember, Alondra Cano’s, seat in Ward 9. You have not yet officially launched your campaign and, at the time of this writing, you don’t have a campaign website so the language we are getting is from the Star Tribune. Despite not formally launching, your message is clear. It’s even repeated on the meme your campaign is sending around, vote for Gary as he runs for his “old seat in Ward 9.”</div>
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I am tired of the self-centered approach to US politics, Gary. I am tired of feeling like everything I read is designed to make me react in a particular way. It’s the reason why the only politics I trust are local politics. I have known Councilmember Cano for six years. And I have known you, Gary, for about 23 years. Since you were, I think, 19 or maybe 20.</div>
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You are a white man running for elected office at a moment of intense division in this country, particularly around race and white supremacy. You are choosing to put yourself forward against a Latina, an immigrant. You will be looking for ways to counter Councilmember Cano’s work, while at the same time attempt to shield your actions from anything that might obviously refer to your racial differences. It doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do to try and get around this. As a white man choosing to run at this moment, you have agreed to participate in this moment of deep racial pain and divide.</div>
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When I read the phrase, “Running for his old seat in ward 9,” I heard echoes of “make America great again,” There is no innocence in this game. In this particular moment where white supremacy is continually affirmed at the federal level, as much in progressive ward 9 as anywhere else in the country, it is not possible to make a statement like that and not immediately play into white fear. </div>
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The problem with racism and white supremacy is that it is interwoven with the survival systems of those who were raised to be white in this country. This means that it is always a tool, lying just out of reach, to use in subtle and overt ways when, for whatever reason, a sense of personal survival or safety feels at risk for those who are white. I can’t help but wonder, Gary, if you are more invested in being a career politician than working for the residents of ward 9. Last election, you ran for the mayoral race and lost. Word on the street was that you were thinking about running for Senator Keith Ellison’s chair. When all other political doors seem to be closed, you now go after the position that is most likely to ensure your political survival, to make ward 9 “great again," for yourself and those who have been riled or made uncomfortable by Council Member Cano’s leadership.</div>
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I don’t understand why someone with your experience and relationships doesn’t immediately say to Council Member Cano, “it matters deeply to me that you are successful in your role on the city council. We all need you to be successful. Tell me how I can help, tell me what you need from me, tell me how I can support your leadership.” Instead, you think you have a better idea for what needs to be done.</div>
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Gary, I first met you when you were 19. You were a student at the LGBT Programs Office and I was staff. When I first met you, I felt kindness towards you. You were dating someone I liked a lot. I knew that your family had had a hard time with your gayness. You were arrogant as hell but it felt like a particular flavor of young. I remember you coming in with a whole bunch of ideas for how to make the LGBT Programs Office and other LGBT student activities better stronger faster. I listened to you and said something like, you should find out what others are doing first, see what others have tried, build some good relationships and then see what you can do together. You smirked at me (literally) and said that you already knew what needed to be done.</div>
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When you were first running for city council, you called me for an endorsement. Embarrassing as it is, I didn’t understand what it meant to endorse someone. And so, months later, someone I knew who was also running for your seat came and asked me to endorse him. I trusted his work so I said sure, put my name on your flyer. After you saw his flyer, you called me. You were furious. You wanted to know why I had endorsed him. Again, I was embarrassed. I explained that I hadn’t fully understood the endorsing process and that you only had the one chance and that I hadn’t thought it through about this candidate versus you or anyone else. You said to me, you realize he is only reaching out to you to get to me. I said, this man is running for a ward with a high LGBT population. Of course he is talking to LGBT people to garner their support and to show that he gets our issues. You repeated that I was naïve and he was doing this to get to you. That it was personal. You hung up, furious at me.</div>
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Gary, you have long struck me as being the progressive south Minneapolis version of the same line of political posturing that includes Bill Clinton and possibly even, at its most extreme end, Donald Trump. Remember what I said: white supremacy hijacks the body’s survival systems and so will use whatever is necessary to make sure that the body feels ok, settled, and empowered. While the political differences between the three of you are huge and I would never say that you are the same nor do you represent the same communities, interests or issues, I would say that there is similarity in terms of how you play the fields, the communities, you are trying to reach. It’s this self-interest, the ways that in moments of stress you can pull on whiteness to lift your own body over others, this ignorance of how you contradict your own spoken values when you do this, that makes me disappointed in you.</div>
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Right now is there is an astonishing and powerful coalition of POC and white candidates who are emerging to run for new ward seats who will work together including with councilmember Cano. This is what collective politics as opposed to self-interest politics looks like. This is what it looks like to say our electoral campaigns are about changing the patterns of control and pain that keep putting us right back in the same place of deep inequality. Gary, many of us are looking for people who are going to ask communities who are struggling right now with more things that get in the way of a liberated life, how can I best have your back? How can I most support your leadership and vision for change? I wish you would ask that question, Gary, in service to those who have not been represented by US political history rather than what seems to be service to your own career. It would make me think that 19 year old boy had finally grown up.</div>
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Sincerely, Susan Raffo, 9th Ward resident</div>
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(This was posted in February 2017 as a Facebook note)<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike></div>
Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-62203595027849235932017-10-01T12:30:00.000-05:002017-10-01T12:30:11.829-05:00A call for economic justice that reflects the occupation of this land, the role of the institution of slavery and immigration<div class="_4_j7 _5s6c">
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In 1944, FDR spoke about the meaning of security for "post war" America. As part of that speech and in response to the growing international focus on human (mostly political) rights, he called out for a "Second Bill of Rights" guaranteeing Economic Rights. These are the rights he suggested:<br />
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<li>The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industr<span class="text_exposed_show">ies or shops or farms or mines of the nation;</span></li>
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<li>The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;</li>
<li>The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;</li>
<li>The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;</li>
<li>The right of every family to a decent home;</li>
<li>The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;</li>
<li>The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;</li>
<li>The right to a good education.</li>
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While not all of these were enacted, some, like Social Security, Medicaire and fair mortgage practices, were created. These are the very economic safety nets that the Right is politically working to end. But in 1944, FDR's call was not the only action taking place.<br />
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Also in 1944, The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) a Native American indigenous rights organization, was founded in response to the ongoing termination (otherwise known as genocide) and assimilation policies that the United States forced upon the tribal governments in contradiction of their treaty rights and status as sovereign entities.<br />
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1944 is also seen by many historians as the year the Black Civil Rights movement began as Black soldiers returned from fighting in WW II and began to organize. It is when NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall won <em>Smith v. Allwright</em> in the U.S. Supreme Court guaranteeing that "all-white" primary elections are unconstitutional, a landmark case in demanding Black political voice and Black agency.<br />
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1944 is also the year when the federal government ended the internment of Japanese families. It is the year after the US ended the Chinese Exclusion Act but created the Bracero program, a "guest worker" program that brought Mexican families to the US for low wage work without granting the benefits of citizenship.<br />
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Economic change in the US has always been directly tied to the history of the occupation of this indigenous land, the histories of the institution of slavery and its ongoing impact, and the histories of immigration and control. Sometimes economic change has benefited the mostly white middle class while largely ignoring those who are poorest or have least access to the political and legal benefits of citizenship. Sometimes economic change has happened precisely because of the political protests of the poorest and those with least access. And large scale economic change has always happened without taking into account the fact that the resources that feed economic health - land and the work that happens on top of that land - are resources taken from stolen land and a continuous history of broken treaties.<br />
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Let's do it differently this time.<br />
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(This was posted in October 2011 as a Facebook note)</div>
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Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-66465792301735909402007-07-29T18:12:00.000-05:002007-07-29T18:16:50.546-05:00Beneficial nematodesI have drunk the kool-aid. Or rather, I have drunk the swamp goo. This is the second year in a row that my lovely squash plants have begun to grow insipid and die. It's all account of the squash vine bore - an evil greasy looking grub thing. Prior to discovering my new love, all of the books told me to get out there as the sun was rising, squat down and see if I can see those squatting bores chowing their way through my plant, then pull them off and kill them.<br /><br />I'm not that kind of a gardener - organic, sure, but spending my morning pulling bores off my plants is just not going to happen. Enter the lovely beneficial nematode.<br /><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular;"><br /></span><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular;">"Beneficial Nematodes are microscopic and live below the soil surface and like a moist environment. Looking like short non-segmented worms these voracious predators make their way through your lawn and garden looking for food. Nematodes do not harm worms, birds, plants or the environment, in fact they are part of the environment and are found the world over.</span> <p><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular;">When the nematode comes incontact with a pest the attack by entering through body openings or simply by boring through the body wall, once inside the Nematode will release a bacteria that kills it's host within 48 hours. They will feed and reproduce before exiting in search of fresh prey."</span></p><p>Apparently, we fuck up the natural nematode order of things with our chemicals and construction and general damage to the ecocycle. But now we can reinsert them and let them microscopically munch their way through the big bad bores and other squishy cousins.</p>I will report back after I scatter my nemotode friends and watch to see my squash plants unfurl in companionable pride - their roots protected by their nematodies.Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-49668020509034010482007-07-21T14:24:00.000-05:002007-07-21T14:31:12.003-05:00Twin Cities US Social ForumI know, it's been four months since I last blogged. I am an incredibly part-time blogger. I am, however, pausing here to add a post about a new blog - the Twin Cities US Social Forum blog.<br /><br />For those unaware of the US Social Forum, it took place in the last week of June and was a movement- building gathering in which 15,000 people from all over the country - mostly people of color with a significant queer and youth presence - gathered together to share workshops, strategies, lessons learned and visions for, literally, making another world possible. This was the US contingent of the World Social Forum - the WSF has the theme "Another World is Possible" and the US Social Forum carried the theme - "Another World is Possible, Another US is necessary".<br /><br />A few months before the US Social Forum, a small group of us began to organize in the Twin Cities, seeking to help local activists get to Atlanta for the US Social Forum and working to begin building connections for an eventual focused and ongoing social justice movement building effort in the Twin Cities. There is extraordinary work happening here - particularly in immigrant justice/worker rights and green urban planning - but there is also a lot of work to be done. Our Twin Cities moment is, what we hope will be the start of a slow and thoughtful effort to make connections between communities and groups working in the Twin Cities for broad-based social justice, something that is, at its core, led by and envisioned by those whose lives and communities are most affected by the ravages of capitalism and US imperialism.<br /><br />So, check out our new blogsite - it's mostly for communicating about activities and sharing resources, but it's a start!<br /><a href="http://tcussf.blogspot.com/"><br />http://tcussf.blogspot.com/</a>Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-4694833733743313242007-03-13T14:58:00.000-05:002007-03-13T15:10:37.079-05:00Caucawhatsit?Twice this week - once on the radio and once in a magazine article - I've heard people refer to "Caucasian" as a race. Please please can we throw this term - and all attached to it like Negroid & Mongoloid - to the ground?<br /><br />The term "Caucasian" originated in the 19th century when physical anthropologists (remember, anthropology at this time was a newish academic discipline born when the colonizers wanted to study the colonized - Europeans studying Africans, Asians, Indians, etc. - and needed something to differentiate them from us so while sociology could continue to be the study of ourselves (white on white) anthropology became the study of the other) tried to find a way to define different types of people/races based on the shape and size of their head. Yup, race as skull bumps, nose bends and chin juts. "Caucasian" comes from Mount Caucasus in what is now, I believe, Russia and was used because some British folks at that time thought the people who lived on Mount Caucasus were particularly beautiful - in a light-skinned, thin-nosed, small-lipped way. The same folks who brought us "Caucasian" to describe Europeans (and people from the Indian subcontinent due to the Sanskrit-Aryan connection) also cited Mount Caucasus as the origin of all human life on earth. They believed it started with all us light-skinned, thin-nosed, small-lipped white people. Poor folks, what would they have done with tiny dark Lucy, the mother of us all?<br /><br />I'm not sure why some folks still use "Caucasian" to describe white folks, other than its what they learned. I've heard some people talk about white people as "Europeans" in a way to distinguish us without using the politicized idea of "white" but, since Europeans in 2007 are dark-skinned, olive-skinned, snow-skinned and so on down the line, that isn't accurate either.<br /><br />For me, "white" is what we have, however inadequate that is. But then, that's the problem with race. It doesn't exist. There is no real difference between individuals based on skin color, facial features, hair texture, or body type. It's the systems we've created that exist - racism, white supremacy, etc. And to try and talk about us individual bodies impacted by and propping up these systems, we have to use this largely ineffectual language.<br /><br />But please, not "Caucasian" anymore.Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-36507337254622078962007-03-08T13:14:00.000-06:002007-03-08T13:31:41.432-06:00As exotic as housepaintThis morning, walking down Lake Street towards the bus stop, I was reminded by how subjective the experience of "exotic" is. There I am, meandering down a street that is two blocks from my house, peeking in the store windows, trying not slide on the ice, when I noticed a family standing on a nearby corner. A white middle-class-seeming family - mom, dad, two adolescent children in warm nonstandoutish clothes. They are holding hands and looking around them with very big eyes. As I approach them, I hear this: "Yeah, I know, it's amazing isn't it," said the dad. "And it's not even 9:00 yet but look at all the people." The daughter was peering into the window of the Latin American grocery store on the corner and she turned to her mom, "I'd be afraid to go in there. I wouldn't know what anything is." "Aw honey," said her mom, "It' s just exotic. You don't have to be afraid of exotic things."<br /><br />At that instant, I felt a part of their "exotic" urban tableau and wondered if I was an addition to their movie or a disappointment. Was I too white to fit into their exotic white frame or was my fake fur coat and Tibetan scarf "urban" enough in that earthy crunchy PC way?<br /><br />This reminded me of something that happened when I was 18. Accepted into a private liberal arts college that was about 20 minutes from my high school but which none of us had heard of before, I was sitting in the coffee shop, reading and people-watching. I idly noticed a group of students at the next table over talking about this service project they had completed the weekend before. The group had gone into "the city" - Cleveland, in this case - and had helped kids do some gardening or build a playground. All of these years later, I can't remember WHAT they were doing, only that there were kids and they were helping them. I wasn't paying super close attention to what they were saying until I heard, "God, I couldn't believe how poor they were. Those poor kids, I mean, I don't know what their life must be like everyday. Doing this made me really realize how much I want to help people." Now, the youthful enthusiasm and raw feeling aside, there really isn't that much to examine in that statement beyond unpacking the notion of "help". But that isn't what I did at the time. It was the next statement that caught me. The group began to describe in detail a Virgin Mary grotto up on the side of a hill, talking about how "cool" it was and how amazing and admirable it was that poor folks still hold on to folk traditions instead of just watching TV or something like that. What caught me was that, with their description of the grotto and the rest of their words, I realized that they were talking about MY neighborhood, the one where my grandparents lived, where I had gone to elementary school. My emotional or political or personal development at age 18, combined with how much I was struggling at this college anyhow, meant that I felt embarrassed by their comments, as though they could see through the cafe divider and know that I was one of "those people." I felt like I was part of their tableau and the conclusions they were drawing made me deeply uncomfortable, even alienated.<br /><br />It's hard to look at anything with compassion, curiosity and zero judgement. The tapes play in our heads: "papers blowing around a streetlight, must be poor here, oh is that tagging, what annoying hoodlums they are" or "white nuclear family looking out of place on Lake Street and somewhat afraid, probably Republicans from the suburbs."<br /><br />I'm trying, really trying, to just listen and look without defining and judgement. It's one of those life lessons I'm feeling all embroiled with. It's also astonishingly difficult, particularly when I realize just how much of my history is based on gaining recognition and even a kind of strength through the articulate nature of my judgements. In some ways, and my friends will laugh, these days I am feeling quite mute.Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21713499.post-44151302884242737842007-02-28T09:02:00.000-06:002007-02-28T09:13:19.872-06:00What did you say?I told you I was an inconsistent blogger. Here it's been a timespan again since last writing - and so much has happened, too. I could have blogged about the day that Luca and Raquel came home from Brazil, about putting Luca to bed after not being home for three weeks, about how cute she looked nestled into her bunk, and how startled we both were when Raquel, following her nose, came in to Luca's room to see what smelled funky, picked up the duvet covering Luca's innocent little body, and then gasped as a cascade of dried cat shit flew through the air, bouncing off our heads, the bed, and the walls. I could have written about that and asserted that my nose was stuffed and smelling no wrong, that I hadn't been in Luca's room since they left for Brazil, but I did not.<br /><br />I could have blogged on Monday about how lovely the snow was this past weekend, how we spent Sunday morning as a pod of kids and parents, breaking the new snow with our sleds on the hill in front of our house. I could have told you how funny it was to see the kids, tired from climbing up and down the hill, all sitting at the bottom and playing in the snow while their aging parents whooped and hollered on the sleds.<br /><br />But none of that got me to blog. Instead, I'll write about what happened this morning - with a preface first.<br /><br />Raquel and I will have been together for 12 years this September. That qualifies as a "long time." Over many of those 12 years, Raquel has frustratingly asked me to get my hearing checked. This, of course, in response to my vacant looks, my request that she repeat herself (usually expressed as "huh?" or "what?"), and my lack of response to her repeated questions.<br /><br />Because I love my girlfriend, I went this morning at 7:30am for a hearing test. First, those booths are kind of cool. I mean, you're in this little gray womb, all hushed and dead air, and then you put on little headphones. The sounds that come through each earpiece - one ear at a time - is specific and sent straight into your head. There is something strangely intimate about the whole thing.<br /><br />So we did the bup-bup-bup sounds and the high pitched squeals and the low heartbeat throbs. Sometimes the sound was so quiet that it felt like a slight vibration, like the ghost of sound itching just on the precipice of your hearing. After the assorted timbres and tones, we went into word repetition: "Say the word: throat." "Throat." And so on.<br /><br />Having told the hearing technician that I was getting a hearing test to see if I was losing my hearing or losing my mind, and then having explained that this was a gift for my girlfriend, the technician, named Mike, came in at the end, took off my earpieces and whispered, "You have freakishly excellent hearing."<br /><br />"Freakishly excellent." Shit.<br /><br />Time to pay better attention.Susanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12282761670461599651noreply@blogger.com3