Medicine for the Resistance

We are moving into elder spaces What does that look like as we try to make our way through community? We continue our series of looking to the spiritual for connections, to heal the disconnection of colonialism and to find ways to build community. Listening to each other, to youth, and to what our elders left for us to find. Jothi Saldana is a South Asian artist and educator and the founder of Eternal Springtime. Find her at http://www.jothi.ca

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Ceremony is about connection to each other, to Creator, to the beings of a place. It is a way of remembering and teaching. We are innately spiritual beings who look for ways to connect to things we don't fully understand. Continuing the conversation about church and Christianity, we talk about finding our way home through ceremony.

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Discussions about Christianity in racialized communities are fraught with feelings and deeply entrenched ideas about identity, family, and community. Dismantling, rethinking the aspects of it that are consumed or dominated by power can be difficult, particularly when so much of the history is built on language embedded in the text itself. But these conversations are important. Potawatomi Christian mystic Kaitlin Curtice joins us for Part 1 of a two part conversation.

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Elizabeth Warren and the enduring myth of the Cherokee ancestor in the American mind. Cherokee academic Daniel Heath Justice talks about Cherokee history, allotment, and how claiming Cherokee Identity is a form of claiming belonging while erasing Indigenous people. Special shorts at the end of the episode on cosmology and culture.

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Briana L. Ureña Ravelo talks about the different ways that Black, Latinx, and Indigenous identities are constructed in Latin America, the Carribean, and North America, and the deep seated anti-black and anti-Indigenous roots of the various systems. We also review the Netflix series Siempre Bruja, plan the resistance, and learn about a really cool project in Detroit that we'll need to follow up on.

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Starting with the casual racism of Liam Neeson and somehow turning into a discussion on what a new world could look like, this is a special shorter episode of Medicine for the Resistance. It's what happens when your guest is late and we are left unsupervised.

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Mosa McNeilly is an interdisciplinary artist developing a diptych play Sipping Freedom that tells the story of the middle passage through the use of contraries, sacred clowns. Relying on personalities from Yoruba and Voudo traditions, Mosa explores freedom, captivity, and complicity. Mosa lives her life at the crossroads, a place of choices and consequences.

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.Reconciliation in the classroom with Miskito educator Liz Bonisteel. Liz is a teacher librarian at an elementary school and uses her position to ensure that children are educated in a way that recognizes and honours diverse voices meaningfully. Her own personal story, the events at the Indigenous People's March, and her work in the classroom are all intertwined.

Opening with a poem by Cheryl Savageau from her book Mother/Land.

Our theme is Fearless.

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Karen Lawford, who wrote the course we discussed earlier with Veldon Coburn, joins us to talk about developing the course. Karen got a degree in Chemistry and natural sciences before studying to be a midwife, and then studying the government policies around midwifery itself. As always, the conversation meanders through the honeycomb world and ties together previous conversations with Kim Tallbear, Daniel Heath Justice, and Jonathan Ferrier.

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Medicine For the Resistance kicks off a new series of conversations asking the question, how do you be a Black or Indigenous person in this world? Our first conversation is with Sabrina Shawana, a mother of three (two Anishanaabe, one Mohawk) children, navigating them through a colonial world with their identity strong and intact. We meander quite a bit, but it wouldn't be M4R if we stayed on topic ...

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