Grief and the Healing Heart: Becoming Whole Through Grief When our heart breaks, it is because our heart cannot hold the amount of love needed in that current moment. When navigating life with a broken heart, it can feel hard to put the pieces back together without the help of community. Humans are social creatures, and we are not meant to grieve alone. In this webinar we will discuss techniques that can help us anchor into the bigger picture of where our grief is pointing our hearts. When we grieve, it is because our hearts cared about something important. Sometimes we need the additional help of a container to process stuck grief. Discover some simple techniques and more in this webinar.

Calling Ancestors into Social Justice: Performance or the Truth in our Bones? The term “Ancestors” is popping up in mainstream media more and more often. It is becoming a commonplace term, but what does it mean? The use of altars, the naming of ancestors, the pouring of libations have become commonplace in social justice circles, at convenings and gatherings that often marginalize these very sacred practices. These practices have become trivialized in certain spaces and also placed on agendas as requisite bookends. While these practices have also become universalized, there can be a dangerous unintentionality and spirituality without full understanding. While the invoking of ancestors cannot and should not be policed, it is a practice that should be handled with intention and handled skillfully, using the tools to responsibly engage with the ancestors. Ancestral accountability, evolution and communication is bi-directional, meaning that invoking the ancestors is a call-and-response as there is often a response when our ancestors are called. There is a tending to and a caring for our altars and our ancestors that is required when they are called into a space. There needs to be safeguards for those not ready to engage with ancestors, theirs or yours. Agreements and safety discussion are often needed especially in multiracial spaces or in spaces where there may be past violence, sexual abuse, or other ruptures in relationship with ancestry or heritage because of historical trauma, or historical harm caused by an ancestor/s. This session will offer a path for navigating the triggers and fears that need to be addressed, as engaging with ancestors may provoke a traumatic response, feel emotionally, spiritually or religiously charged, or may even feel like an unwanted encounter, depending on who the ancestor is or what they represent.

The Trauma of Being in Leadership: Why Leaders Are Sometimes Sick and Dying This workshop will bring together directors from various demanding social justice, health and healing fields, living under toxic conditions inside and outside of our organizations, clinics, community settings. Too often the ones in leadership positions are subjected to lack of respect for their personhood, disregard for their grief, their fears, their pleasures or their joys. They are often the most depressed, the most suppressed, the most accommodating, the most sacrificial, the most burdened and saddled with the challenges of their organizations and their communities. Some go days without eating or showering or even basic breaks throughout the work-day. They feel guilty on vacation. They leave no out-of-the-office message because they are never out of the office. They operate under constant guilt and the belief that if they put the work down, “they are abandoning someone or that someone could die”. There is a constant fear of failure. Leadership can be lonely and there are so few trustworthy people to turn to in times of crisis. Most leaders have no boundaries with the work - they do not know where the work ends and where they begin. This course offers a way to be in a healthy relationship with one's purpose.

Indigenous and Black women will discuss how current and future practices towards racial healing are made through the application of African and Black American teachings, parables, rituals, traditions, and medicine coupled with traditional Haudenosaunee governing practices, talking circles, ceremonies to truly weave each other into what is natural to the land.

Black, Indigenous, and women of color will discuss land using a survivor focused and trauma informed lens. They will explore various avenues to heal from radical models like matriarchal villages, to other approaches like co-stewardship, reparative justice, environmental and healing justice, and restorative practices.

Sacred Circle led by Judge Cheryl Demmert Fairbanks, Esq. Indian Peacemaking Initiative and Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska Appellate Court to discuss and share sustainable models for healing and reconciliation, as well as processes for accountability and justice for past wrongs by colonial powers.

The current landscape of Black land justice movement led by Black Feminist and Afro-Indigenous leadership.

The current landscape of Indigenous land-back movement led by Traditional Haudenosaunee leadership.