In collaboration with El Porvenir Services:
Deconstructing
Colonizer Mentality
November 22, 2021 - 10am - 12pm PDT on Zoom
How do we deconstruct oppressive systems and salvage our humanity?
Colonizer mentality is ubiquitously and insidiously woven into dominant US culture:
“Finders keepers, losers weepers.”
Board games that teach us strategies for real estate speculation, gentrification, and monopolization.
Wearing cultures as costumes and logos.
Wild misappropriations of the word “decolonize.”
Holidays that celebrate colonization.
Etc., etc., etc.
Without early and explicit critique, colonizer mentality is ingrained in us as children through stories, games, media and myths. It’s inherent in the drive get everything we can for free or as cheaply as possible; to “grab it before it’s gone;” to have an “authentic experience” in “exotic” locales; to treat people and their labor as commodities; to ignore the long-term impacts of our short term caprices; to believe ourselves the saviors of anyone other than ourselves.
Colonizer mentality infects our personal and professional relationships, fuels our patterns of consumerism and consumption, is enshrined in our beliefs about entitlement and rights, creates dysfunctional relationship with the earth, and blocks the kind of accountability and sacrifice necessary for collective liberation and healing.
As we collectively seek to honestly acknowledge and make amends for the irreparable legacy of colonization, how do we identify and dismantle colonizer mentality in our individual thoughts, actions and relationships?
Join us for a generative facilitated dialogue on November 22nd, as we discuss:
What is colonizer mentality?
How can you spot it around you . . . and in you?
How is it intertwined with all other forms of oppression we experience and enact?
Who could we be without it?
The recording of the session will be shared with all registered participants.
Who is this for?
People who recognize patterns of colonizer mentality in themselves.
People who want more strategies for naming and confronting colonizer mentality.
People who materially benefit from the legacy of colonization today, regardless of when or from where your people came.
People interested in exploring how colonizer mentality intertwines with white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, and other systems of oppression.
All proceeds from the sliding-scale registration for this session will be donated to The Chúush Fund to benefit the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs as they work to restore their access and infrastructure for clean water.
Facilitators
Carlos Kareem Windham
As Principal and Founder of El Porvenir Services, LLC., Carlos is on a mission to bring communities into the future, and to center the voices of the most impacted in the reclamation of their power in the intersection of race, class, and gender. Through El Porvenir, Carlos works for the creation of just ecosystems where people maintain long-term relationships across difference, in the creation of outcomes that provide equitable opportunities for the most excluded. Carlos is a Black de-Tribalized Pueblo Indian born in Boulder, Colorado.
Theresa Logan
Theresa is Principal and Founder of Subduction Consulting and a facilitator with 20 years’ experience in community organizing, community development, public policy engagement, organizational equity, conflict resolution, and restorative justice. She is dedicated to perpetual learning, and works to support others in building their own capacity, skills and strategies for collaboration, conflict transformation and trauma healing towards our collective liberation.
Theresa is eternally grappling with how to be in right relationship with people and with the land as a 5th generation descendent of Irish and German settlers and single-mother raising children with Black and Indigenous ancestry on the traditional lands of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla and many other tribes.
Accessibility & Fair Exchange
All proceeds from the sliding-scale registration for this session will be donated to The Chúush Fund to benefit the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs as they work to restore their access and infrastructure for clean water.
Our community access and fair exchange sliding scale for this session is $50 - $200.
Black and Indigenous people are invited to attend free of charge.
If your employer is paying your registration fee and is a PWI (predominantly white institution) and has the means, please ask them to pay the full amount.
If you are an individual paying for your own registration, or your employer is a community-based organization, please pay as much of the registration fee as you are able - and be sure to give like your ancestors took.
Questions?
Contact Theresa@subductionconsulting.com