This course is for women with African descent (including the black diaspora) who would like to connect deeper with their ancestral knowledges and healing practices, while doing so within the context of healing what needs to heal on a societal level, for the decolonization and liberation of all indigenous knowledges. We gather online once-a-month for 6 months and end with a weekend land-based ritual retreat in Quebec (about 1hr from Ottawa). We begin Nov. 10th.

• We begin with a cosmological shift: from a linear colonial cosmology to circular Indigenous cosmology 

• We then begin healing our minds, souls and bodies through a circular cosmology, centering traditional African healing practices such as ritual, plant medicine, cleansing, divination, art-making, Yoruba and Dagara spiritual teachings and Ancestral guidance.

• We reconcile with the Earth and Cosmos, exploring traditional African practices of elemental rituals, animism, astrology, and metaphysics. 

• We find paths of reconciliation between traditional African science & medicine with modern Eurocentric science & medicine, using complexity science as a system of knowledge that connects these two different ways of knowing.

• We come to understand how our collective histories, including colonialism, imperialism, slavery, displacement, invention of racism, intergenerational trauma, patriarchy, capitalism, and other societal structures, affect the health of our minds/bodies/souls and communities. We do so from an anti-victimhood perspective.

• We then re-tell our stories, re-membering the knowledge that has always been in us, reclaiming our brilliance, beauty, and resilience, as we move out of colonial narratives and into our proper place in history, the present, and future, seeking to contribute to the healing that is needed at all levels of life, across all societal structures, reaching 7 generations back and 7 generations forward all at once.  

• We bring our movement together in solidarity with the resurgence of Indigenous knowledges and peoples across Turtle Island (and the world), with intention to live out the Annishinabe prophecy of lighting the 8th Fire (in reference to Elder Dave Courchene and the 8th Fire Prophecy documentary by Turtle Lodge, Manitoba). We seek to bring our Black Curves around the fire and restore the black curve of the medicine wheel.