Public schooling in the US started from the kidnapping of Native children from their families.
The colonizer clocked in day after day to violently strip the culture, light, and wholeness from the Indigenous children.
These Native children would be away from their families for months, enduring beatings, every kind of violence and abuse.
Do not turn away from this truth.
Let it land in your heart.
Feel the stones and weight of grief these kind of atrocious actions bring up.
We all have the power to be a part of the healing from this.
Colonial education normalized a systemic and continuous severance from Indigenous ways of being, relating, learning, creating, gathering, etc.
A systematic cutting away from the body’s knowing.
From the land’s rhythms.
From the ancient intelligence that lives in our bones.
The same intelligence our ancestors used to track seasons, nurture village, read the sky, thrive.
We may feel the ways colonization continues to impact us as overwhelming, which is so valid, it’s designed that way, you guessed it, on purpose.
We’re literally swimming in toxic colonized waters…
Colonized education is set up around the child needing to perform up to colonizer standards…
What other messages do you see colonized education sending to our children? To adults?
In truth, the education system falling apart today isn’t “failing” it’s working exactly how the colonizer designed it to work “strip the culture, soul, light from the child”, “create a society so unwell they don’t have energy, time, or money to fight back”.
Here’s what the colonizers can’t take…
Our active remembering, reclaiming and practice of the Indigenous wisdom that lives in us.
Indigenous wisdom tells us – everything that matters returns.
We’ll meet the rage again.
We’ll meet the shame again.
We’ll meet the place where we learned to make ourself small, again.
And each time, we spiral through, there is opportunity for deeper medicine.
For growing capacity.
For more authenticity.
Western education taught us to fear repetition.
If you’re revisiting something, you failed.
If you’re feeling it again, you didn’t heal it right.
But the spiral knows, return is not regression.
Return is deepening.
The tree doesn’t apologize for growing rings.
The snake doesn’t shame itself for shedding skin.
The moon doesn’t think she’s failing because she wanes.
Why do we?
What if the “progress” we’ve been chasing is actually another colonial measuring stick?
What if we’re not behind but exactly where the spiral has brought us?
Do you also feel the exhaustion of these times?
The shame spiral of “why am I still dealing with this?”
The performance of having your shit together when really you’re good at pretending, masking, and holding your breath.
We are not broken.
We were never broken.
We’ve been colonized.
And now we’re remembering.
This is embodied education.
This is liberation work.
Not in your head.
In your bones.
Feel into the return of honoring the feminine energy in all of us.
Feel into the return of treating food as medicine.
Feel into the return of treasuring our joy, rest, creativity, and play.
Feel into whatever returns your soul, body, and mind are ready for.
And practice, in repetition, in devotion to reclaiming this remembering in the body.
Be in movement with your unlearning and remembering.
My Rarámuri ancestors practice this to this day.
They practice running ceremonially, to remember – to feel the earth, to return to the body, to let the rhythm restore what the mind had forgotten.
You come from people who knew how to spiral.
Even if colonization told you to forget.
Even if school taught you that your body’s wisdom was primitive, savage, wrong.
The body remembers.
The DNA remembers.
Your nervous system remembers.
The land beneath your feet remembers.
All we have to do is practice returning.
December 7: Education as Repair – a live gathering to explore how we move from punishment-based to restorative approaches with the children in our lives. Because our kids deserve learning that doesn’t sever them from themselves.
December 21: Collective Visioning Circle – winter solstice, the darkest night, the moment before return. We spiral together into what wants to be born.
Here is a free resource to intentionally bring the spiral into your life – download the free Learning Spirals guide – a return to embodied learning and how to practically guide these kind of re-indigenized learning experiences.
The call for reclamation is guiding us home.
Not to who we were before the wounding.
To who we’re becoming because of it.
Stronger in the broken places.
Medicine born from the pain. Liberated.
One breath.
One choice.
One return at a time.With liberated love,
Dahlia
For those wanting to learn more about US boarding school history
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