The materials for this week are guided by Indigenous and/or Black decolonial perspectives that provide a more expansive understanding of what it means to live in right relationship with all that is, i.e. “in the oneness” (Manuel). Through different points of intervention, they reinforce that humans are not the only beings that suffer from patriarchy, colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism. We are asked to witness the destruction that these violent systems and epistemes have brought to living ecologies, and the repression of the feminine in many facets, resulting in yet additional forms of “us” and “them.”
They also reinforce the importance of listening in spiritual activist work, and how changing how we listen and what we are listening for can shift how we come to interact with all beings from a place of right relationship–including whose knowledge counts as knowledge.
As Robin Wall Kimmerer names in Braiding Sweetgrass, English, a colonizing language, “doesn’t give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy. In English you are either a human or a thing.
Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropariately, as a he or a she. Where are our words for the simple existence of another living being?
[ . . . . ] Learning the grammar of animacy could well be a restraint on our mindless exploitation of land. But there is more to it. I have heard our elders give advice like ‘You should go among the standing people’ or ‘Go spend some time with those Beaver people.’ They remind us of the capacity of others as our teachers, as holders of knowledge, as guides. Imagine walking through a richly inhabited world of Birch people, Bear people, Rock people, beings we think of and therefore speak of as persons worthy of our respect, of inclusion in a peopled world. . . . Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us. We don’t have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us. Imagine how much less lonely that world would be” (56,58).
Vandana Shiva adds to how a western scientific model severely restricts any meaningful, living connection with the many living beings we cohabit this Earth plane with.
For this discussion post, please reflect upon:
How can decentering the impact of these destructive systems on humans while centering the marginalized, largely silenced voices and perspectives of other sentient beings shifts an understanding of spiritual activism–what it “is” and what it looks like?
How can we understand these offerings as forms of praxis to aid in people unlearning modes of relationship rooted in domination and remember what connectedness, interdependence, collaboration, and reciprocity can look and feel like?
