Fernando Arce reports about the session on Real Peoples' Media: "Indigenize or Die: Reclaiming Cities and Traditional Lands"
Notes from small group dialogues:
How can we restore our responsibility and relationship to the land and water where we live?
- Gratitude: Exchange--Ask before we take, and give back
- Connect, honour, acknowledge
- The choice to see the opportunities to connect vs. the barriers
- Connection and awareness to the green spaces around us
- To restore relationship to the land we live on, we need to spend time on it, connecting regularly
- Education: create awareness of how we are connected to and part of nature
- Facilitate experience of the land to support the transition from knowing to caring
- Ongoing, deep connections to particular places that eventually help foster responsibility
- Individually educate ourselves regarding water and about what is in our neighbourhood
- Learn more
- Healing ourselves and land and indigenize relationships
- Putting intention into action: "Digging in the Dirt"
- Commit to small acts of responsibility
- Start doing small things
- Starting where you are... "It's all one land."
- Human rights: prison industrial complex
- Asking where do we start? What do you need? LISTEN
- Hosting events around food. Restoring justice.
- Create a regenerative economy
- Create alternate systems
- We need to recognize our shortsighted relationship to the land and adopt a long term, sustainable vision for the future that is inclusive and respectful of life.
- Indigenous land sovereignty
- Creative ways to dance around bureaucracy
- (Don't forget to) keep fighting the system/status quo
- Develop the capacity to listen deeply in order to offer meaningful dialogue and understanding
- Observation and deep listening to land and others
- Be inclusive and listening
How can we restore our responsibility and relationship to the Indigenous People of this land?
- Through learning, listening and respectful dialogue
- Bring open heart to learn indigenous world view
- Listen and be open. Honour and put yourself outside your perspective
- Through humility
- Humble yourself, check yourself and actively seek knowledge from communities
- Educate (wampum): Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)
- Indigenous placemarkers, indicators, art
- Be aware of the struggle to pass on Indigenous knowledge
- Educate ourselves (as a lifelong process): stories, treaties, struggles, knowledge
- Education on who used to be here and their traditions
- Acknowledgement of territory
- Partnership between indigenous and non-indigenous
- Develop relationships. Ask the indigenous people of this land how, and be ready to listen (and be uncomfortable). Decentralise the indigenous voice.
- Stand with indigenous peoples as allies in the fight for decolonisation
- Learn, connect, get involved: rallies, ceremony, modem, languages--even how to say "hi," "thank you," demonstrations, Idle No More, go to powwows
- Commitment to healing [on the part of indigenous people]
- To restore our responsibility--decolonize our settler selves as a foundation for building relationships with indigenous people with commitment and integrity and trust
- Recover our own indigenous roots--find out where "we" came from and how colonised
- Working to de-colonize and indigenise our institutions (schools/education, health care, legal system, government)