Taking an honest, rigorous, and accountable approach to this work helps us to make good decisions about our journey home to Indigeneity. How we get there matters just as much as the destination itself.
The goal of the Intro to Coming Home Work class is to gives reconnecting Native and/or Indigenous student a framework to do decolonization work from. By teasing out each layer of our identity in a stack and looking at them one by one, we gain greater clarity, affection, and understanding for who we are. By having clear stops on a road map home, we can figure out where we are now, where we need to go and what to look for along the way. By going through the tools that we all need to walk this road together, we have a better chance of getting there.
But the Introductory class is just that, an introduction. It is over within a 3 week period and can leave us with a lot of questions. That is what the Diving Deeper Class is for. The work of decolonization is not only about figuring out our journey home, but also about transforming our minds and hearts along the way so that we are capable of living up to and learning the ways of our elders, communities, and traditions when we get there. To show up as emotionally fragile people who are lost and looking to be fixed is both irresponsible and unnecessary. Native Raised Native communities, including the ones that we all come from, struggle enough resisting capitalism and genocide without us coming back and trying to take over, think we know better, or be an emotional burden that drains people’s resources. It is our responsibility both to be honest about the fact that we are Native Raised Other, and to unlearn the behaviors that we picked up being raised within capitalism. As we take the journey home together, honesty and accountability go hand in hand.
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Stacked Identities
In this class we will go deeper into all of the layers of stacked identity that we talked about in the Introductory Course:
National
Racial
Religious
‘Normal’
Gender
Class
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Capitalist Behaviors
We will also learn about the impact that of the behaviors embedded within capitalism that we grew up with instead of our Indigenous/Native ones:
Greed
Fear
Arrogance
Self-Centeredness
Isolation
Comparison
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Course Details
Only students who have already taken the Intro to Coming Home Work class are eligible to take this class.
We will only teach 10 students at a time.
This is a 12 week course that will take place online on Zoom.
Each class will be 2 hours long, with an optional unfacilitated 3rd hour to hang out and keep talking.