The Movement Class: Decolonizing our Bodies, Embodying our powers

Tuesdays 6-8PM

First Class: Tuesday October 9

Location: Gazebo in Royal City Park, across from the Boathouse on Gordon St. This will be for at least the first few weeks. To let us know you're coming, or to ask any questions, please email healingtheearth@resist.ca.

The Movement Class: Decolonizing Our Bodies, Embodying Our Powers

Colonization

Colonization can be defined as the theft of territory, self-determination and freedom of indigenous peoples. Canada was founded as a colonialist country and the colonization continues today, and presents a great threat to not only indigenous people, but the earth and everyone else. The colonial worldview has corrupted all of our bodies, hearts, minds and spirits. We believe that to be colonizers, one must first be colonized, and from this belief we feel it is important to engage in different kinds of decolonization work.

The facilitators of this class are not native to Turtle Island, but we feel it is important for us to see many things through an analysis of colonialism. This class is NOT a class to dance away white guilt nor to appropriate Native spirituality in our attempts to get free. We feel it is necessary to be aware of and oppose the violence of colonialism, and to ally ourselves with anti-colonial struggles on Turtle Island.

Decolonization

Decolonization is about freedom. There was a time when Indigenous peoples could not have imagined not being free. For those of us who have been uprooted and settled here for one reason or another, that time may be much further back in our ancestry. Either way, today quite the opposite is reality; it is difficult to imagine being free, and worse, we have come to think this situation is freedom.

Things have got to the point where a great number of people have become allies of the colonizers. It is ever important to dig through these layers, to cast off these shackles of colonization that oppress us in every manner possible. We find that the more steps we take in this direction, the more we find we had long forgotten certain possibilities that exist for us.

Decolonizing Our Bodies

Decolonization takes many directions; we can, and need to, decolonize the earth and our human communities, as well our bodies, hearts, minds and spirits. The Movement Class is partly about reclaiming our bodies' innate wisdom, to explore opportunities for a deeper sensual knowing of our bodies' landscape through different kinds of healthy, creative and enlivening movement.

It is our hope that participants will actively share in the learning process in practical, hands-on and fun ways. This class is intended to be playful, physically engaging and challenging in many ways. It is open to people with different abilities, and we hope to challenge people's ableist assumptions that only certain people can do certain types of activities. There are as many ways to dance and move creatively as there are people.

Embodying Our Powers

It is through decolonizing that we can become dis-illusioned, to see more clearly what has been stolen from us. Part of this is our body’s innate intelligence, our intuition, these deeper levels of knowing from which great personal power comes. This relates just as much to our physical bodies as it does to our emotional, energetic, and dream bodies.

Through this class we want to work on many things, to be decided on by us together – to hone instincts, deepen intuition and bodily awareness, to activate, attune, and re-sensitize our senses, and to embody more of our physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual & mystical powers.

We are excited to work towards cultivating these powers through practical exercises, activities, discussions, interactive play, dance, movement, self-defense, and other ways to get physically comfortable in our bodies and in the spaces around us. This may include being silent and attentive in forests, navigating city streets, jumping and climbing, dancing, playing with our energy, and more....

We want to challenge ourselves by being playfully chaotic, ecstatically alive, and seriously solemn. Through this we can come to face our fears, conceive appropriate directions for our healing, and explore and deal with trauma through all different kinds of movement.

We really hope you can join us.

-- AnarchistUGuelph - 25 Sep 2007