Reorienting Our Minds, Ourselves and Our Futures: A Youth Visionary Collective Workshop
On July 31st, 2021, the Roots & Routes IC’s Youth Visionary Collective (YVC) interns met with Co-Founder and Executive Director, Juli Hazlewood. We learned about the origins of the organisation and her journey to co-found Roots & Routes (R&R). The purpose was decolonising ourselves and re-orienting ourselves in relation to one another and to the organisation.
This very week one year ago, in 2019, our board members packed their things and headed to San Clemente (Imbabura Province), Ecuador, to tend the seeds of who we will become as an organization. From August 21-25, 2019, we collectively dedicated all our energy to Strengthening the Roots Between Us. We put our heads together to envision and strategize who we wanted to become as a community-based international organization.
Roots & Routes IC board members and staff head into meeting site in San Clemente, Imbabura Province, Ecuador.
Having worked and lived with the Chachi, Awá and Afro-descendant communities of Ecuador’s Pacific Northwestern Chocó Biogeographic Region for over two decades, Juli shared with us her vision of seeing people arm-in-arm, creating action-education networks, and coming together to value all life on the planet. A tagline for the organisation, therefore, is “we are worth more than the resources below our feet.” As an activist, researcher, writer and educator, Juli has collaborated with Indigenous, Afro-descendant and other place-based communities to defend and protect their ancestral territories, cultures and diverse ways of knowing since the late 1990’s.
Questioning her conservative upbringing in Indiana (USA), Juli told us about her skepticism towards Western notions of development that assume that some countries are more “advanced” than others, as opposed to understanding them as diverse cultural expressions. She speaks to that in the following video.
Taking things to the next level at college at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Juli wondered about the concept of “sustainable development”. Why did it seem that the Occidental world was re-inventing this concept? Hadn’t the purportedly less civilised Indigenous peoples been practising sustainable development all along? She had the opportunity to find out during her six-month internship for Community Studies in Ecuador, working with the UTEPA—the Technical Unit of the Ecuadorian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Eco-development of the Amazon and the Awá Region.
During the internship Juli had the chance to travel to Indigenous communities bordering Colombia and Peru throughout the Amazon. She also had an experience that would forever change her life: she lived with the Indigenous Chachi people in the Chocó lowland rainforest for two months.
Due to the logging industry in the historically isolated region, the Chachi people were facing increasingly more environmental destruction and territorial conflict. At the same time, Juli was learning to jump from root to root alongside them to keep from sinking in the mud. While doing so, she realised that it was these kinds of Indigenous peoples’ cultural practices and knowledges based in maintaining a delicate balance that are precisely what are needed to bring about greater equity between people and the Earth.
These experiences inspired Juli to set up R&R to accomplish the following goals:
To facilitate sharing knowledges between cultures for Indigenous and other land-based communities to have the type of opportunities that she was having so to learn from one another and strengthen their cultures;
To create opportunities for the communities to be the teachers to directly share their knowledges and practices with the youth world-over.
In relation to both approaches Hazlewood said,
“We can all learn how to take care of nature and biodiversity directly from the communities, who are at the forefront of environmental destruction. ”
Hazlewood discusses re-orienting ourselves relative to re-assembling the foundations of human-nature relations, as inspired by communities applying the “Rights of Nature”, an Ecuadorian constitutional right.
The four main ways in which the historical alienation of Indigenous peoples is addressed by R&R is through re-storying, restoring, revindictating and reciprocating. At the heart of this is the restorying of the world, excavating dominant narratives to get to the diverse meanings of being human. Moreover, Roots & Routes challenges us to restore the balance between ourselves, nature and one another as we grow conscious about our relation to earth’s environmental resources, rivers and oceans. Re-vindicating refers to the need to re-establish economies of respect and confront systematic racism, injustice and oppression to walk with communities’ struggles for their rights to self-determination and implementing life plans on their own terms. Finally, the different layers of the colonial onions can only be peeled back if communities act together, establish reciprocal, compassionate and respectful relations. Roots & Routes describes the reciprocating program as the following:
“How to connect with our hearts in a way that we can connect with other people and the earth”
The Youth Visionary Collective is a youth-led community and internship program that emerged in March 2020, and integrates aspects of all four programs. Youth from around the world come together, take ownership, and play an active role in carving out new ideas towards alternative ways of learning. Creative collaboration across different generations, geographies and cultures is at the core of what the YVC is about.
Edwin Magaña Lopez (Mexican American), who has been a part of YVC for 6 seasons and also is the YVC Board Representative reflects on his experience or re-orienting with Roots & Routes so far:
“We have created a community which is a catalyst for new ideas and pathways to get away from all ways of colonisation, which have shaped our ways of thinking and being.”
Decoloniality, on the other hand, works to re-story, restore, revindicate, and reciprocate; we decolonise knowledge, systems, economies, our bodies and legal frameworks. By starting where we are—our own positionality within the colonial matrix of power and knowledge, we re-orient ourselves relative to the world around us. We decolonise the stories and narratives we have been told throughout our lives to reshape new realities.
Will Shain (Brazilian American), an intern at the YVC since spring 2021, appreciates the emphasis that has been put on decoloniality throughout the season, as this “encourages us to do the most ethical work that we can”.
The Re-orientation workshop provided us with a platform to share with each other, reflect on our own positionalities, and more clearly define our roles within R&R. Collectively re-orienting made us realise that we are united in our deep desire for systemic changes to secure a better future for ourselves and our loved ones.
“We really need to be in touch with the environment and nature. It is what has given us life, what makes us human. Working with R&R allows us to collaborate and find harmony together in spite of our differences.”
We couldn’t agree more. We look forward to continually sharpening the re-orienting experience to better serve Roots & Routes, Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples, and the world.