Toward Right Relationship Workshops are Zooming
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Friends who have experienced the “Roots of Injustice, Seeds of Change: Toward Right Relationship with Native Peoples” workshop might be surprised by this: we are now offering this participatory, experiential workshop via Zoom.
It did seem impossible back in March and April when the pandemic was new. In the Toward Right Relationship workshops, people move around quite a bit, and the movement is a key component of the mental and emotional learning that takes place. So how could we possibly accomplish our goals with everyone sitting and staring at computers?
Let’s take a step back to give a quick description for Friends who have not yet experienced the Toward Right Relationship (TRR) workshops: Through a series of exercises, four speakers tell the story of the European colonization of the land that became the United States. The speakers read the words – direct quotations – of Native Americans, Euro-American colonists, and Western historians, and the story is tied together by a narrator. As the history of our country unfolds, participants symbolically experience its impacts on Native populations and their lands.
The Toward Right Relationship with Native Peoples project grew out of the work of the Indigenous Peoples Concerns committee at the Boulder CO meeting. As a member of the committee, I started developing a workshop to help Friends understand the impacts of the Christian Doctrine of Discovery and to encourage their support for the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In response to the workshop experience, Boulder Friends and Intermountain Yearly Meeting were led to approve minutes to that effect.
That was 2013. Since then, the work has spread to faith communities, schools, universities and civic groups nationwide through the efforts of more than fifty Native and non-Native TRR workshop facilitators. Developed and nurtured under the care of Boulder Meeting, the work is now part of Friends Peace Teams.
So back to the beginnings of the pandemic: Even though we could not gather in person, we wanted to continue to offer our workshops, especially as the pandemic brought into sharp focus the systemic inadequacies of healthcare in Native American communities, and the murder of George Floyd brought into focus police violence against all peoples of color, and wildfires in the West brought into focus the disproportionate impacts of climate change on Native communities. TRR’s co-director Jerilyn DeCoteau (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) and I knew that this was not a time for our work to go dormant. It took Kody Hersh, a young Friend from Florida with tech skills, to lead us into Zoomland.
In May, Kody and Sandra Laursen (both of whom are TRR facilitators) and Jerilyn and I started working as a TRR Zoom team. Over the summer we pilot-tested our ideas with other TRR facilitators. Now, having presented the workshop-in-progress seven times, we are confident in making it available to groups throughout the country. Please keep your eyes on the Calendar of Presentations on the Friends Peace Teams – TRR website for open workshops you can join, or ask us to offer a workshop for your meeting or community. Contact me at paulaRpalmer-AT-gmail-DOT-com.
The Toward Right Relationship with Native Peoples program offers other online programs, too. Please visit our website to learn more.
Paula Palmer is a member of Boulder Meeting, IMYM, and co-director of Toward Right Relationship with Native Peoples, a project of Friends Peace Teams.
from Paula Palmer, Boulder Friends Meeting (9/27/2020)