Bartimaeus Kinsler Institute 2020: Unsettling Histories | Decolonizing Discipleship | hukišunuškuy

Click HERE to register and for more info!

This year the BKI will follow up on the Bartimaeus Kinsler Institute 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.

Full registration includes a copy of Elaine Enns and Ched Myers’ forthcoming book Healing Haunted Histories: Decolonizing Our Landlines, Bloodlines and Songlines (Cascade, summer 2020). Note: you do not need to have participated in 2019 to join us in 2020.

Above right:“Bartimaeus Billabong”, painted for the 2019 BKI by Australian Indigenous artist, Safina Stewart. www.artbysafina.com.au