Re/membering Our Rooted Selves

... we were all born ‘pre-modern’. ‘Relatedness’ is a condition that all of us continue to be capable of achieving, experiential contexts of some minimal duration. Our ‘modernity’ — our inclination toward abstraction, detachment, and objectification — is the product of our disembedding biographies. It is in being involuntarily deprived of ‘relatedness’ that we become Cartesianists. — Alf Hornborg (2006)

Observing the zeitgeist of our current times, self-defined Indigenous communities and individuals are choosing to re/assert their “selves” outside of the dominant dualistic discourse of coloniality identity. Those cultures and individuals that have been swept up in modernity’s net the longest, are also shifting towards re/membering connections to land and the more-than-human.

Community, kinship, relationality ... elements of a way of walking in the world that in the rush towards modernity took a back seat in the priorities charted by the few, which forever impacted the many. There is much emphasis made on the turbulent times of now, where we are seeing cracks in the system's facade, revealing socio material places of decolonial impairment, cracks that shock our reality, bringing more questions than answers.

Bayo Akomolafe, philosopher, psychologist, professor, and poet, sees \cracks\as something that disturbs how we chart our world:

\cracks\ 'exist' as potencies and tensions in the fabric of the familiar. They invite something more than seeking solutions, enacting justice, or seeking victory over one's enemies. They invite a post activism that leans towards more risk-taking ventures and unprecedented ways of addressing today's crises.

We have the impression of movement towards something better, not realizing we are indeed walled within the same framing. It is only when the stranger - a \crack\ - disturbs the existing narratives with news from the lands beyond that we begin to envision other pathways. As an example, the climate crisis could be re/envisioned as a relational crisis. But what kind of relationality is being summoned? When we talk about "saving the planet," who is being called upon? Beyond the stories of human heroes and villains, American anthropologist Anna Tsing invites us to imagine a narrative in which human centrality is left aside: "[i]s it possible to conceive of landscape as the protagonist of an adventure in which humans are just one kind of participant among many others?"

So, if we then consider the idea of shifting our systems towards something in harmony with Earth's system, our inner systems - our thinking and worldviews - would surely benefit from shifting as well. How, then, might we re/member our ‘pre-modern’ selves if our hope is to enact different potential futures? In the words of Angela Davis - political activist, philosopher, academic, and author: “How do we live in the existing world and at the same time inhabit an imaginary?” We then ask How do we create stories of continuation even in the face of the precipice? How can we find other ways of saying, of narrating, of living?

In Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, Brazilian writer Ailton Krenak emphasized that “it is no wonder that precisely the peoples who refused to participate in the anthropocentric banquet are increasingly summoned to "postpone the end of the world.” Nonhumans are also evoked in this attempt to find other worlds: plants now promise other ways of thinking. How do these ideas reconfigure political imaginations and signal whether there is a world to come? Here we evoke Sankofa, the Akan/Ghanaian mythical bird pictured with its feet planted forward, its head turned backwards, with an egg in its mouth. Se wo were fin a wo Sankofa a yenkyi - It is not a taboo to return and fetch it when you forget.

The backward gaze indicates that there is wisdom in learning from the past to understand the present and to shape the future. The symbol can also signify the need to reach back inside of ourselves to re/evaluate, re/member and re/claim a past “so as to understand the present and why and how they have come to be where they are and who they are today.

In the book Banzeiro Òkòtó: A Journey to the Amazon Center of the World, which translates so much about the urgencies that haunt us, Brazilian journalist Eliane Brum says that we live in a time of the middle: "the end of the world is not the end, it is the middle." So what if we choose to see our current moment as part of a continuum of time and an ongoing journey, then this is an invitation to re/claim that which has been left behind that can feed us as we move into the future. It is in the spirit and ethos of the “re/” that this program is grounded - a call to re/connect to memory and dreaming and re/root through storytelling.

You’re invited to join in the dialogue with various voices, perspectives, and languages from offering the possibility to re/awaken and relate to the unknowable.