The Friday classes offer a structured opportunity to learn from teachers who are excited to showcase a particular aspect of rewilding that they are focused on.

What Rewilding Means and How to Be Culturally Competent in Practicing It

(With Peter Michael Bauer and Deana Dartt)

Class Description: There was once a time in which no one bought food from the grocery store: you simply went out into the world with your friends and families, and collectively hunted or gathered it. Through small-scale, place-based, regenerative subsistence strategies, humans lived this way for millions of years. With a constant dialog in ever-changing ecologies, humans experimented with a diverse array of strategies for acquiring food. The vast majority of these strategies fostered resilience, and continue to do so today where they remain in use. However, a small number of them led to a growth-centered, non-regenerative economic system resulting in ecological degeneration, the formation of hierarchical States, and genocidal expansion.



These Empires create dependency by attacking the subsistence methods of surrounding cultures. By killing wild plants and animals, building fences, creating private property (maintained by violence with a military), by limiting access to the correct permits, tools, and knowledge, colonial societies maintain their dominance by eliminating access to local, regenerative subsistence practices, and forcing people to grow food in a colonial way and to buy this food from a store.



For indigenous people, rewilding is a fight to reclaim and decolonize their lands and to rekindle ancient traditions of place-based resilience. For displaced Native and non-native people, rewilding is a struggle to shed the reliance on conveniences associated with the devastating impacts of capitalism and repair the damage we’ve done as threads in the colonial tapestry. For all of us, rewilding is about understanding the traumas inflicted on humans and our ecosystems by those with power and privilege, and working our way back to a regenerative, non-invasive (or “naturalized” in plant terminology) relationship, recognizing there is really no going back, only forward—within the occupied territories and colonized landscapes we now live and the environments we steward today.



How do we move past colonial identities, together? Our liberation is dependent on one another. As the sixth extinction intensifies, so does the inevitable collapse of the resources that make occupation possible. We need to be ready for this, and start laying the groundwork for cross cultural collaboration now. In order to do this, we must first acknowledge the unequal relationships between the settler and the displaced, and begin to build trust through humility and understanding. What does building this trust look like? We don’t have all the answers. Nor do we feel there is one right way forward. However, the framework in this talk will create the basic parameters for starting this conversation, to move us all toward a place of healing.