Earth People Power:

Unsettling white folk by honoring our forebears and our futures.

Sunday July 19 from 10:00am-4:00pm

Who are your ancestors?  What do they mean to you, for you, here and now?  If you have European roots, how do you remember them, the ways your folk were once indigenous to their land, the ways they were colonized and eventually became settlers?

For many of us, the answers to these questions start out blurry, awkward, and irrelevant to the hyperkinetic world of networked apocalypse.  But as we discover ourselves through and beyond the "end of the [Empire's] world", the long story becomes our own story.

This workshop invites us to ground our antiracist, anticolonial solidarity in accountability to generational time.  We start with three assumptions: 1) to be responsible to our decolonized descendents, we craft a meaningful relation between them and our ancestors; 2) to be useful accomplices with radical communities of color, those of primarily European descent remember and invoke our own ancestral commitments as people of the earth against Empire; 3) to discover liberating pathways our colonized minds can't believe, we turn to the wild, to the more-than-human world and our bodies' ability to listen.

This work will be emotional, intellectual, spiritual, physical.  A day is enough to crack open the shell; it is barely enough.  We will invite each other to take risks, and also to hold each others' struggles.  The workshop will have some lecture and facilitated conversation, and also time alone with the forest, and speaking together in small groups.  Please RSVP early as you will be invited to do pre-work in gathering what you know about your European ancestors and reading what has been written about their journeys from there to here.

brush is descended mostly of farmers, ministers, clerks, and cops, whose ancestors were English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Low German, African, and South Asian. Socialized male, raised poor followed by an elite education, brush brings to this work two decades of passionate action and reflection in radical movements from ecodefense to militant unions, from organizing infrastructure to priestessing rituals, from third world squatter camps and fourth world rebel zones, to urban ecologies in the cities of the North.

Cost $50

Discounted Cost for Friends of the Farm Monthly Donors: $35

Early Bird Special!: $10 off if you register by July 4th.

Some scholarships are available for those prohibited by cost. Please e-mail workshops@tryonfarm.org to make arrangements.