This is a reading of an article, by the arts/research collective, Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF), shared with me shortly after our Ecoweaving gathering at Wilbur Hot Springs, in early May. It “weaves together Indigenous teachings that affirm that if we approach the potential, likelihood or inevitability of the collapse of our current system with relational maturity, sobriety and accountability we will be taught to heal our relations and coexist differently with each other and the Earth.”
GTDF uses their website as a workspace for collaborations around different kinds of artistic, pedagogical, cartographic, and relational experiments that aim to identify and de-activate colonial habits of being, and to gesture towards the possibility of decolonial futures.
GTDF is also a practice that is multi-layered and rather difficult to explain:
- It is about hospicing worlds that are dying within and around us with care and integrity, as well as attention to the lessons these deaths offer, while also assisting with the birth of new, potentially wiser possibilities, without suffocating them with projections;
- It is about facing our complicity in violence and unsustainability and its implications with the courage of really seeking to connect with the collective pain, past, present and future;
- It is about composting our individual and collective shit with humility, joy, generosity and compassion, trying to “dig deeper and relate wider”;
- It is about holding space for difficult conversations and silences without relationships falling apart;
- It is about recognizing and taking responsibility for harmful modern-colonial habits of being (in ourselves and around us) that cannot be stopped by the intellect, by good intentions and by spiritual, artistic or embodied practices alone;
- It is about interrupting modern-colonial addictions, in particular addictions to the consumption of knowledge, of self-actualization, of experiences, of critique, of alternatives, of relationships and of communities;
- It is about recognizing that we are an extension of the land-metabolism that is the planet, not the other way around, preparing for the end of the world as we know it, and showing up differently so that “another end of the world” becomes possible;
- It is about dis-investing in desires for unrestricted autonomy, authority, certainty, control, protagonism, purity, popularity, superiority and validation to create space for acccountabilities, for response-abilities, for exiled capacities and for deeper intimacies;
- It involves learning and unlearning, disarming and de-centering, dethroning and de-arrogantizing, detoxifying and decluttering, mourning, grieving and healing, digesting and metabolizing, seeing ourselves as cute and pathetic, so that the wider metabolism can breathe and move more easily within and around us;
- It involves loosening our attachments to our self images and to what we think we want, so that we might instead step up, own up, clean up, grow up, wake up and show up to do what is really needed, whether or not it fits with our personal agendas.
With thanks to GTDF for their commitment to making all their resources open access under creative commons and to support their artistic and research partners. In the context of the current crises, they have Indigenous partners in Brazil and Canada who are in need of more immediate support. Please donate to their emergency fundraiser for communities here if you can.
Thank you also to the supporters and indigenous peoples of the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative, for holding space for those of us who recently visited, to step into learning and unlearning, into right-relationship allyship, and into walking a path of entangled liberation.
“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” – Lilla Watson