Unsettling Histories | Decolonizing Discipleship | hukišunuškuy
Feb 17-21, 2020 Bartimaeus Kinsler Institute
This year we will follow up on the BKI 2019, when we listened to and learned from a range of Indigenous voices concerning land, law and language (note: you do not need to have participated to join us in 2020). The 2020 BKI, as Rev. Art Cribbs puts it, “aims to help us toward 20/20 vision,” by:
Unsettling Histories: Cohorts will focus on the personal and political work required of settlers and immigrants, in order that we might more deeply:
– understand how our narratives, communities and landscapes in North America are haunted by violence and injustice, past and present; and
– heal the myriad layers of our colonization, and colonizing behaviors, inward and outward.
Participants will examine our own familial and communal immigrant/settler histories—where our people came from, where and how they/we settled, how they/we colluded and collided with the colonial project, then and now.
Decolonizing Discipleship: We will imagine and strategize how, as persons and communities of faith, to embody more meaningful practices of:
– restorative solidarity and relationship with Indigenous communities; and
– “response-ability” to name, understand and resist historical and current structures of settler colonialism.
hukišunuškuy: (pronounced hu-kee-shoon-óosh-kooy): A mitsqanaqan (Ventureño Chumash) phrase introduced to us by local Chumash scholar activist Matthew Vestuto that connotes a different kind of settling: “A promise to vision together.” Guest Indigenous leaders will serve as interlocutors through the process, encouraging us to become reliable “Treaty People” and to work together toward justice and a decolonized future.
The BKI2020 was once again held in the Ventura River Watershed, with around 90 participants and resource people taking a deep dive into their own familial and communal immigrant/settler histories—where their people came from, where and how they/we settled, how they/we colluded and collided with the colonial project, then and now.
Available now are the Photo Essay and Program Book from the week
