A pathway to re-Indigenization

It is deeply affirming and empowering to know that we can reconstitute ourselves from erasure.

We can bring ourselves back from the place of confusion.

We can change the conditions of our internal landscapes and change our worlds.

We are that powerful.

We are that wonderful.

I understand engaging on the path to re-indigenization as a precursor to visionary political activity. So that what we are working to create is created from a place that is firmly rooted in possibility. This place is an anchor that itself models what we are seeking to manifest. And so we can only give what we have and we can only create what already exists within us.

From that place of understanding of our true creative power, I propose the following praxis:

0 1. To understand that by a large quantity, the most important and ubiquitous political activity occurs at the nanopolitical level and is enacted through love politics. Control politics are the tools of institutions, abusers and oppressors. Control politics are based on power/over relationships. Love politics are based on power/with. From the nanopolitical enactment of love politics all things are possible: personal and collective freedom; and responsive human centered systems in governance, education, justice, health care, and the economy.

0 2. Creativity is part of original human tasks along with gathering and sharing resources and intimacy. All oppressed peoples have gotten free as individuals and communities through the enactment of creative acts. Whether that freedom is fleeting or enduring, all social innovations that have advanced the path to freedom have been built on creative and defying acts of insubordination and rebellion. Having a creative life of some kind is as essential for us as breathing. Creative engagement is the birthplace of culture.

0 3. Developing knowledge in community is another original human task. Assessing where we are, what we know about a place and peoples there is an essential part of learning to be with that environment. Knowledge through storytelling, observation, deduction, and sharing with others for engagement with other types of knowings is an essential part of our lives. All of our communities are actively engaged in knowledge making as part of the process of being alive. Being insightfully engaged in knowledge making, helps support leadership and create culture.

0 4. As peoples who survive genocide, stewarding and creating culture is leadership. Organizational cultures reify White Supremacy and should be dismantled in favor of the creation of cultures that support human beings and their engagement in knowledge making, creativity, relationships, and modes of production that support their lives and well being. To be an indigenist leader means to create cultures that center human beings and that model an appropriate relationship between humans and the natural world. It means to create cultures that create conditions of life that are optimal for humans and for the world that we rely on for our well being and reproduction as a species.

0 5. Enacting indigenist leadership is an effort to re-indigenize community, to create communities that wholeheartedly enact the conditions that gave rise to our species consciousness, as Humberto Maturana-Romesín put it, by:

• Organizing in small groups

• Around the feminine and the future

• Gathering and sharing resources

• … and intimacy

The implications of these core re-indigenizing principles are many for organizations seeking to transform anything. The practices that accompany these principles are:

0 1. Sovereign logic

0 2. Coalition politics

0 3. Solidarity as practice: Meaning being present and accompanying the social struggles of others as a result of your awareness of your implicit participation in the creation of those conditions

0 3. Circle process: as a practice for community and organizational governance, personal and collective accountability, and for the enactment and execution of community functions such as engaging in grieving, celebration, crisis response, etc.

0 4. Systems thinking: as a practice of awareness and analysis that grounds you on an understanding of deep interrelationships between problems and solutions, interconnection, and collaboration

0 5. Indigenist collaboration: as a practice of building long terms alliances and collaborations based on values and ethics, with a grounding on shared language, analysis, vision, values, ethics, visions for the future, shared actions and learning.

0 6. Ceremony: as a practice for connecting with that which is sacred for the purposes of unloading one’s burdens, course correction, seeing where we are anew, changing perspective and surrendering limiting beliefs, behaviours, attitudes, actions, patterns, and language.

0 7. Strategic rebellion: the enactment of rigorous, disciplined long term rebellion by working continuously to innovate, implement, learn and transform everything we engage and that comes from the enactment of control politics.