Our Unlearning
Our Unlearning is a collective that aims to galvanize, organize and build collective culture.
Welcome, we are glad you are here.
Our Unlearning is a collective of white people commited to unlearning and undoing our colonial ways of knowing and being so we don’t perpetuate more harm.
We do this imperfectly.
We do this grounded in the teachings and direction of Indigenous, Black and other People of the global majority, in relationship with ourselves, each other and the land.
We do this by building shared language and practices in social and collective learning through an online community.
We do this through an embodied experience of processing, integrating and practicing Indigenous specific anti-racism and Indigenous cultural safety learnings.
Our Unlearning builds off the framework of racial caucusing/affinity groups which provides a setting and space in which white settlers hold each other accountable to a vision of building an anti-racist community
(Crossroads Ministry, 2008, p. 5; see also Blitz et al., 2012; Churchill et al., 2017; DiAngelo, 2021).
Our Unlearning is a container created to increase accountability in action and reduce the emotional labour put on Indigenous, Black and peoples of the global majority.
White settler people have work to do
and we need to do it together.
Our Unlearning is not an alternative or replacement for anti-racism teachings offered by Indigenous, Black and other facilitators and guides within the global majority.
White settler people need to continually prioritize, deeply listen to and invest in these critical offerings and teachings.
Our Unlearning is a process container, an accountability system and a community.
Racism, whiteness and settler colonialism are products of white culture; and white people must step up to do the collective work to undo, divest and deconstruct those systems.
Our Unlearning is listening to the Indigenous, Black and Brown peoples of the Global Majority and have heard that white people need to do the work of unlearning whiteness with other white people.
This is at the core of Our Unlearning.
Join us in a space to build collective understanding and skills, hold each other accountable, grow our stamina to be actively anti-racist.
We are collectively unlearning and culture building.
Our Unlearning is a cyclical, embodied, personal and collective journey that starts by joining a Community Cohort followed by ongoing participation in and accountability to the Our Unlearning Network.
see below for details on each step.
Our Unlearning is not a course
It’s a culture.
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STEP 1 - Community Cohorts
This is where you join Our Unlearning. You will be invited into an initial unlearning container where we explore content and context required for this collective. This initial step is foundational for participation in the many offerings within the Our Unlearning network and has been developed by, and continues to be informed by Indigenous and racialized/peoples of the global majority that we are learning from and in relationship with.
This 3 part, 9 module offering is an advanced community Unlearning journey. It is a facilitated, transformational social space led by co-unlearning facilitators.
Keep scrolling down for more info on the modules. Or, click below to sign up!
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STEP 2 - Our Unlearning Network
The Network of Unlearning is an ongoing container to support the integration and ongoing living of anti-racist practice. Disrupting generational patterns can not be done in a one off course or workshop. When white settler people only engage in thinking differently collective transformation is not possible. We need the ongoing engagement and accountability of a community accountability space. This is why we have created the Our Unlearning Network.
Please start by signing up for our next Community Cohorts.
OR If you have already done a cohort with us, or feel you have the equivalent experience click below to book an intro 1:1 with us to see if its a fit.
What you can expect
Our Unlearning Community Cohorts
. What You Can Expect:
access to 9 weeks of curated content centering and amplifying the voices and brilliance of Indigenous, Black and Brown peoples / peoples of the global majority on an easy to navigate platform;
A facilitated social learning experience with other white settler peoples;
Somatic practices and exercises to support for repatterning;
An introduction to the self-awareness, knowledge and tools to support our practice of unlearning and undoing whiteness/settler colonialism and dominance;
Self-guided lessons, and over 20 hours of virtual and/or in person group integration;
Decolonized activities and exercises grounded in nature-based, reflexive and embodied practices;
Structures of personal and collective accountability;
Opportunities to practice and be witnesses in our resistance, discomfort, imperfection and vulnerability;
A container to build skills and stamina related to receiving and giving critical relational feedback;
Social sessions to support specific intersectional settler identities and experiences (some examples of this include our upcoming queer white settler and cis-mens cohorts)
Access for 3 months to the Our Unlearning Network for continued support, accountability and community
Our Unlearning Network
What You Can Expect:
An easy to navigate online network;
Regular weekly drop-in practice and accountability sessions;
Somatic practices and exercises to support for repatterning;
Activities to build community and cultivate a culture of embodied anti-racist practice;
A decolonized curated library of foundational documents, podcasts, books, articles and more including calls to action and justice and ways to engage in local Indigenous led events and actions;
Linkages and opportunities to participate in community based reciprocity and accountability activities;
Self guided reflective prompts and practices for integration, processing and deeper understanding;
Helpful resource to explore and deepen our relationship to the lands, waters and plants of place;
A connection with other committed, imperfect unlearners;
After first year in the network participants may have the opportunity to expand into co-facilitator roles within the network
An open and unlimited invitation to participate in future Community Cohorts (including ongoing access to all of the materials);
Bonus: workshops with IBPOC guest teachers, guides and storytellers.
What We Explore in Community Cohorts
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The unlearning starts here - this week we open the sessions by locating ourselves on Indigenous homelands, strengthen our capacity for land acknowledgments beyond performance, review tips for engagement in the course and go over a brief introduction to racial caucusing / affinity group work.
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This week, we are invited to connect with our values and integrity; and the importance of both/and thinking. We begin critical exploration of relationships across difference and consider how we each contribute to creating safer spaces and what it means to include a somatic lens in social justice work.
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This week we will work on understanding our own self location from an intersectional perspective, begin to interrogate our role in systems and structures of harm through the teachings of humility and interconnectedness.
Part 1 - Collective Location and orientation
Part 2 - Collective Truth: Discomfort and Tending
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This week will focus on working on our white racial identity development (WRID) starting with an invitation to really explore what whiteness is and where it lives in us as we build our self awareness and stamina to see, name and interrupt it.
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This week, we work with predictable patterns of racism, identifying common actions and behaviors as aggressions towards Indigenous, Black and Peoples of the Global Majority that cause and perpetuate harm. We also explore and practice interruption and processes of repatterning.
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This week we call on our collective courage to explore a deeper connection to what violence has, and continues to happen on Indigenous homelands, what it means to occupy these lands, how we benefit from settler colonialism and what sovereignty and reciprocity look like in day to day life.
Part 3- Collective Undoing: Connection and Community
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This week we explore the centering and dominance of whiteness by considering the characteristics of whiteness as they show up in self and systems, and become familiar with the power of some key antidotes.
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This week we will be learning about ways to identify, interrupt and disrupt racism with practical skills in an integration and processing session.
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This week we will interrogate the concept of allyship and begin to explore our relationship to Indigenous solidarity and co-liberation. As the final we will focus on a transition into the network, inviting consideration of how to build the fortitude and love of this lifelong, life giving journey of unlearning.
How We Are Different
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Our Unlearning is not a course.
Our Unlearning is about creating transformational change in understanding and most importantly our ways of knowing and being. We do this together through ongoing, collective, relational engagement.
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Our Unlearning is mutual
In Our Unlearning we are there to Unlearn together. This is mutual, cyclical work where we hold each other in relationship and accountability. There are no experts and the goal is not getting it right. We build trust and relationships to sustain our ongoing responsibilities and hard work. .
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Our Unlearning is a container
Our Unlearning is a container for white settler people to process and integrate. This is the invitation, the space and the community for us to move beyond intellectual, transactional achievements towards embodied practice of culture building.
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Our Unlearning is emergent
To engage in Our Unlearning and is to come together across intersections of experience and identity to deconstruct structures of settler colonialism, patriarchy and whiteness as we collectively contribute to what is emerging… This is relational, disruptive and life giving work.
“What if the work of confronting racism were no longer the sole work of peoples of colour? Instead, what if white people galvanized resources to organize and lead a human rights movement focused on dismantling white supremacy inside institutions, communities and families? What if?”
- Ruth King