#community organising
Native Women in the Arts is pleased to be presenting the Elders who form the Strong Earth Alliance, Harry and Juliana Snowboy. Please join us for teachings on Puberty Rights and Prophecies. This event is open and free to all community members.
Puberty Rights: This ceremony is one of the most important after the birth feast, where the childhood stage is let go by the youth and the transition into adulthood is made. This ceremony, brings the young person into the spirit world of grandmother earth.
Prophecies: There are Earth changes happening but there are also changes coming to human kind. A reawakening, “a higher level of frequencies” as explained by Harry Snowboy. There are visions and instructions he received as a young man that are now coming into being.
Friday April 8, 2016 from 6:30-8:30 pm
Location: Centre For Social Innovation – Spadina
Room: Innovation Lab – 4th Floor
215 Spadina Avenue
Toronto Ontario
M5T 2C7
416-598-4078
Juliana Matoush-Snowboy (James Bay Cree): Juliana holds a B.A. in Psychology from Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario. She is trained in suicide intervention (ASSIST, 2002), spent six years as the Social and Health Planning and Programming Officer for CBHSSJB in Chisasibi, Quebec, and worked as an interviewer for Health Canada in Eeyou Astchee. She works closely with her husband, Harry Snowboy, in running various traditional and healing gatherings both in Cree and urban communities, as well as offering drug and alcohol awareness seminars. She also facilitates training and coaching for women’s sweat lodge ceremonials. (Languages – English, French, Cree.)
Harry Snowboy (James Bay Cree): Harry is an author, public speaker, cultural advisor, and a traditional healer to numerous Native communities. A former Director of an Aboriginal Police Force, Harry provides information sessions and guidance on leadership, team-work, and lateral violence in the workplace, as well as reviewing and assessing projects involving programs focused on community well-being. His extensive experience in crisis response has provided him with insight on managing both short and long-term crises. He has also provided guidance to organizations seeking to incorporate holistic approaches on problematic issues facing many Native communities. These discussions are geared towards fostering understanding and bridging the gap between traditional and non-Indigenous belief systems (Languages – English, Cree).
The Strong Earth Alliance (SAE) is an organization that offers support to the needs of the First Nations communities regarding their culture, traditions, spirituality, and holistic health. It combines traditional and in at risk situations, trauma crises approaches, management, and holistic treatment programs. This support is provided in a structured, safe, nurturing, and supportive environment that promotes general well-being and where community members reconnect with their cultural identity and feel empowered. SAE encourages diversity and an environment that is respectful and inclusive to all genders, races, religions, and spiritual beliefs.
Photo provided by Strong Earth Alliance.
From this facebook page
The elusive trans woman of color
This is a rallying cry:
Trans Women of Color, or #TWOC (as people who engage in social justice discourse usually abbreviate with no context) are often used to deploy all kinds of guilt and condemnation at groups who experience any number of privileges that my identity group typically does not. I know I should be thrilled by this, but alas, I am not. Moralistic castigations of all sorts are lobbed at people who don’t already ‘get it’. At my expense.
This puts people off whom I so desperately want to support me. I see it all the time, and it is discouraging. I know that calling out racist, cissexists [google it] must feel like a rush of righteousness to the brain. The likes and comments of approval can’t hurt either, eh?
If it matters though, I’d like for those people to be plied with resources and information instead. Given the chance, they could be transformed. They could become my comrades.
I’ve seen it. I’ve facilitated it. Lots of times.
Whoever first said “It is not the role of the oppressed to educate their oppressors” put me in a world of hurt.
I, TWOC in the flesh, do not feel the pangs of interpersonal bias or microaggressions. I’ve endured immense abuse and trauma in my past. What facilitated my healing and resilience was a materialist analysis of the world that relocated my anxiety from individuals to institutions. Namely our economic system, capitalism, and its necessity to perpetuate poverty stricken conditions and perceived scarcity that give rise any number of antagonisms I’m faced with.
Indeed, I want and need people of all stripes at my side against the state. So if you don’t mind, I- your crown jewel and Princess of the oppressed will continue to educate anybody I can. No matter how problematic.
Many social justice advocates, 'warrior’ is a pejorative in this context so I won’t use it, are well intentioned when they use the suffering of trans women of color to decry systems of oppression. Again, I know they are well intentioned, but they do not speak for me.
They go on about TWOC voices being 'centered’. Well here it is. Center it.
Focusing our ire on people who receive privilege instead of people who dole it out is a losing strategy for ending oppression. This idea flows from post-structuralist academic theory that sees collective struggle against domination as largely misguided; That locates interpersonal interactions as primary sites for transformation. Smells like rugged individualism to me. Tumblr has taken this heady theory, and parsed it out for disaffected users to reblog. How convenient for people in power. I imagine Goldman Sachs loves this garbage.
I’m a student at Portland State University. For now. I have received multiple threats of expulsion from the president, Wim Wiewel, and his administration. The nightmarishly oppressive Board of Trustees have armed campus security despite widespread and vocal disapproval from students, staff, and faculty. My confrontational tactics with PSUSU - the Portland State University Student Union to collectively resist have landed me on the chopping block. This has taken up the bulk of my headspace as of late. The clumsy liberal hipster in my Environmental Sustainability class who does not yet understand the gravity of asking people their pronouns simply cannot fit on my list of fucks given.
For the record, said hipster only needed a small push from me to get it. He now stands among our ranks against the power structure of the neoliberal university. This, as revered classroom radicals lambaste incompetent 'allies’ to TWOC on social media to thunderous applause. But the TWOC you use to advance your line of moralism needed you at the Board of Trustees meeting to help her shut that shit down! Thanks ally.
Wim doesn’t need to check his privilege, he needs to be removed from his position. His administration’s salaries need to be cut to fund fair pay and job security for adjunct professors. The Board of Trustees model needs to be dissolved and replaced with democratic models that advance the Campaign for Free College Tuitionand15 Now for all campus employees. The racist campus police need to be disarmed because Black Lives Matter.#DisarmPSU!
I actually want to fucking win. The TWOC you love and adore in the abstract does not think that collectively shit talking problematic individuals constitutes radical community. Concerted actions and campaigns against the power structure does. But will you help me do it?
I have held much of this in because it feels petty to rail against those who don’t agree with me. I think it further entrenches sectarianism. I’ve felt that all I need to do is to press on with my vision for winning justice. That other oppressed people would see me in active resistance, and would be inspired to do the same. So far, it’s mostly congratulations. But I can’t bring your congratulations with me to protests! I need comrades at my side.
Love,
The elusive TWOC
please share widely
