Summons:

A Semester of Re-Calling Our Ancestors

Re-Calling Our Ancestors is a shared inquiry into the work of de-assimilation from whiteness and the cultivation of flourishing ancestral futures.

Solstice to Solstice, A Semester of Six Moon Cycles

Shared learning, ritual exploration, and kinship creation from January to June

Over the course of six lunar cycles from Winter Solstice to Summer Solstice, we will follow the spiral curriculum of Re-Calling Our Ancestors. As a committed cohort and long-form container, we will develop shared inquiry and ritual practice, co-creating a  culture of anti-racism. Together, we will grow our ability to hold the fullness and complexity of the experiences that comprises ancestral recovery work: the disorientation of reconditioning of old patterns, the joys of reconnection, the griefs of reckoning, the clarity of action… 

Through somatic, earth intimacy, and altar work practices, we will stretch our capacity to hold space for the wholeness of the ancestral legacies we carry. As the Moons progress, we will experiment and evolve as we learn and grow together. We’ll have the opportunity to practice creating a brave, anti-oppressive space that allows us to dig beneath the assimilation into whiteness that we’ve inherited, as we go deeper with folks that have shared ethnic lines as well as practice cultural exchange with those of different ethnic lines. This means deepening both in our personal ancestral legacies and inheritances, as well as having the space to go into our collective legacies, inheritances, and shared responsibilities.

Join us in 2025!

Through a series of online sessions, home study and practice, one-on-one peer support, and small group mentorship, we will answers the summons. With ritual, rigor, and — most importantly — relationships we will honor the lineages that we’ve inherited, lay down the inheritances which no longer serve, and hold space for the grief —and relief— of letting go. Collectively we will…

  • Deepen in our practices of anti-racist culture building through shared study, collaborative ritual, and personal storytelling.

  • Immerse in ancestral and trans-generational ways with time, seasonal calendars, and non-capitalist paces of ritual, as we tend the long arc of healing past, present, and future 

  • Engage in collective action in solidarity with multi-cultural struggles for justice.

  • Prioritize exploration of class, money, and ancestral approaches to working with resources as we increase our capacity for cross-class solidarity 

  • Increase individual and communal capacity in engaging with a range of the emotional, spiritual, and social dimensions of anti-racist work.

  • Proceed in a shared learning environment through a culture of titration, capacity, and accessibility.

  • Deepen with the Re-Calling Our Ancestors’ spiral as a holistic framework through which to engage in the work of ancestral healing and de-assimilation.

Semester Syllabus

What to expect from Summons:

  • Each new moon, participants will gather together for a live zoom session. There will be recordings with captions for those unable to attend.

  • Each month, you will be invited into study, altarwork, earth-intimacy, and somatic practice

  • Each month, you’ll meet with a study partners to offer each other support as you engage with the course material.

  • You will be invited to participate in coworking/body doubling sessions to receive communal support in the weekly curriculum and additional self-driven course-related research and creative projects 

  • Throughout the course, you’ll be  invited to take part in open webinar offerings with guest speakers, on themes related to course connect.

  • During the course, you’ll have the opportunity to gather in small groups with those who share similar identities, experiences, and interests as you.

  • Throughout the course, we’ll build connection through an online community hub, where we can share questions, research, projects, and build relationships with one another.

Who is Summons for?

An Affinity Space for White, White-Passing, and White-Assimiliated Anti-Rracist Practitioners

Summons is an immersive educational program and structured cohort experience to explore, experiment, and embody the work of Re-Calling Our Ancestors. This six month semester grows out of the needs that we experience as committed white anti-racists, as well as the input of our comrades, collaborators, and students. Where can we gather to challenge ourselves and each other to make even bolder movements to de-assimilate from whiteness? How can we make movements together away from the knowns of what has been referred to as the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene and toward a future where life can thrive? 

We ask that all participants interested enroll in the Fall Monthlong as a prerequisite.

In the midst of climate chaos, ongoing racial injustice, the continued trails of the pandemic —not to mention the many other compounding systems of harm— we need networks of care and communities of resistance anchored by individuals resourced in radical ancestral practices. Moreover, we need critically engaged and culturally-informed white folx showing up in heartfelt and effective service for movements for justice. Re-Calling Our Ancestors seeks to meet this need by situating white folx within their enchanted, critical, evolving, and relevant ancestral lineage(s). 

When we as white anti-racists strengthen our own resilience and relationships—individually and collectively—through ancestral practices and cultural reclamation, we have far more to offer multi-racial movements for justice. 

  • If you are a Person of the Global Majority and feel resonance with this offering and are wondering about opportunities for your own and collective explorations of these topics, please reach out to Sobey Wing, Cross-Cultural Protocols Chair of the Youth Passageways Education and Consulting Collective, at sobeyone@gmail.com. Sobey can share about opportunities for personal mentoring, the upcoming podcast series by and for People of the Global Majority called Rites of Decolonization, and other potential offerings by and for People of the Global Majority.

  • We honor that race is a social construct, and there are people with white skin who come from Black, Indigenous, and/or other Communities of Color who may wish to participate in this offering. If this is you, you are welcome! And, please know your guides for the journey don’t carry this experience in their bodies so won’t be able to speak to these complexities from personal experience.

Summons is for you if…

  • You have participated in Re-Calling Our Ancestors but want to go deeper

  • You value learning in community

  • You are committed to healing and justice

  • You yearn for authentic, meaningful, emergent culture

  • You see a connection between individual and cultural healing, wellness, and transformation

  • You are able to show up care, grace, and self-awareness in community

  • You are committed to ongoing learning and inquiry regardless of how much work and learning you have done already

Our Theory of Anti-Racist Culture Building:

How we make our way with money…

We believe that how we are with money, together and individually, is part of our pathway out of systems of dominance and toward an emergent, flourishing, co-liberatory future.

Racism, colonialism, and capitalism are deeply intertwined, and their legacies weave through each of our ancestral biographies. During our semester of study together, we will prioritize exploration of class, money, and ancestral approaches to working with resources as we increase our capacity for cross-class solidarity. We will investigate how the byproducts of capitalism - false notions of scarcity, impulses to resource hoarding, competition - yoke us to whiteness even as we attempt to divest and de-assimilate.  

Our studies in this aspect of our work begin with an invitation to engage in practices of resource flow outside of a capitalist exchange framework. Inspired and emboldened by our teachers and mentors, as well as projects like Solidarity EconomyDecolonizing Wealth, and Nonviolent Global Liberation, we will share the overall needs for the course and invite participants to join us in meeting those needs. For those with limited resources, this may mean contributing little or nothing financially. For those with excess wealth, this may mean redistributing their wealth by investing significant funds in this pilot effort. We will be sharing more details about what this looks like in practice when we open registration in September.