Coming Home Work
Rosa Blumenfeld has been doing ‘coming home’ work since 2014. She is a Native/Indigenous woman from the Muisca people who was raised outside of her traditions and lands in Vancouver, BC, Canada. As a child she had recurring dreams of getting on a bus that dropped her off at the wrong stop, or getting on a train only to discover that it was going in the wrong direction, or boarding an airplane that was flying to the wrong destination. She knew that the Colombian and Jewish cultures that she was being raised in weren’t the whole story of who she was, but no one around her gave her any other words to describe herself until she was in her mid-20s. The first time she heard someone describe what it meant to grow up Native Raised ‘Other’ it was like a lightning bolt hit her and those dreams made sense. Ever since she has been on a journey to reclaim what was taken from her and her family due to the combined forces of assimilation, genocide, and anti-semitism and walk a new road heading towards her Native/Indigenous home.
Popular Education
Rosa started teaching popular education workshops when she worked for the labor movement in Massachusetts in 2006. She has been fortunate enough to have her skills sharpened over the years through the mentorship of incredible labor educators at the Labor Extension Program at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, the Labor Education Center at the University of Massachusetts Boston, the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, DC, the United Association for Labor Education, and the Women’s Institute for Leadership Development. She has taught workshops to union members all over the United States about leadership development, power mapping, strategic planning, organizational development, campaign strategy, economic policy, dismantling racism, ending sexism, workplace solidarity, working class history, one to one meetings, target development, and more. Her training in the political, inclusive, and radical nature of popular education is the spirit from which she teaches classes today.
Lake Guatavita
Growing up, Rosa was not given the opportunity to be raised within the kinship system of her Native/Indigenous people: the Muisca. She was raised in a white Jewish community instead. Coming home work has been an opportunity to undo all of these layers of assimilation, including the Jewish one. It is part of the complex and nuanced way that identities and are affected by capitalism, genocide, and racism in different ways.
Rosa traveled to Colombia in 2016 to spend time with her family and the land of her people. This is a key step in coming home work. On a tour of Lake Guatavita led by a Native raised Native Muisca man, she was not surprised to learn about how sacred the lake is to her people. It made all of her memories of playing in pools, swimming in the ocean, or floating in a pond, make sense.
The main way that Rosa has figured out to connect to her Judaism these days is by serving as a Mikveh Guide at Mayyim Hayyim, Living Waters Community Mikveh in Boston, MA, USA. This enables her to keep a connection to Jewish spirituality through service, physical embodiment, and an elemental connection to water that the Muisca people have always had.
Finding Her Voice
In the last couple of years Rosa has always found her voice as a writer of children’s stories, young adult fiction, and non-fiction. She writes stories where Native and Indigenous girls can see themselves as the center of the plot. Where they find what was stolen, lead revolutions, and love themselves. Where they say NO to the world as it is, and use their smarts, hearts, and traditions to bring about the world as it should be.
Stories spark hope and a belief in ourselves, a remembering of who we are, and a will to keep going despite the odds being stacked against us. Rosa hopes that if we can imagine a world where we win, we can create that world too.