Whiteness Is Not An Ancestor: An Embodied Dialogue with the Internalized Colonizer

Photo credit: Alpine Club of Canada camp at Yoho Glacier, 1914. Byron Harmon, from the collection of the Harmon family.

Whiteness Is Not An Ancestor: An Embodied Dialogue with the Internalized Colonizer

We are always in relationship. This is especially true regarding our family and ancestors. They're always with us, and we're always with them. The western trained mind teaches us otherwise, that we are more separate from one another than what the family and collective soul knows to be true.

Dismantling structures that were created out of dehumanizing "other" requires expanding capacity for acknowledging the way in which we are in relationship with all that is without clinging to notions of goodness, innocence, judgement, and exclusion.

More than ever, we need each other: there is one human family. The influence of historical movements of immigration, colonialism, slavery, and war are collective movements that cannot, nor are meant to be, processed by the individual. These histories take place in the context of groups, and they require groups to bring forth healing movements of truth and reconciliation.

With embodied guidance, ceremony, practical wisdom, systemic family constellations, experiential dialogue, and ancestral prayers, this retreat invites you to be with others in a nature based setting to:

• Disentangle the relationship between belonging, race, ancestry, and power.

• Be strengthened by family and ancestral histories.

• Re-member invisible truths held in the body.

• Reclaim belonging, remembering that our human family is nature itself.

• Learn how the shadows of colonialism influence our livelihoods, families, work, health, economy, organizations, and communities.

• Recognize and shift patterns of taking what there is no right to take.

• Unleash creativity.

• Access ancestral strength to support us in facing the future on solid ground.

Led by Lisa Iversen, MSW, LCSW, author of Ancestral Blueprints: Revealing Invisible Truths in America's Soul and Founding Director of the Center for Ancestral Blueprints. www.ancestralblueprints.com.

Organizing Host: Sonya Lea, author of Wondering Who You Are. www.wonderingwhoyouare.com. Sonya can be reached at sonyalea@gmail.com.

For all event details, visit www.internalizedcolonizer.com.