Once Upon A…
Once upon a time…
there was a system of power-over. This system of power-over was based on some people taking whatever they wanted and justifying their taking with a wild, made-up thing called race and racial superiority.
Creating this cultural myth and cruel monstrosity required hierarchies. And so, hierarchies were constructed out of just about everything including gender (which was made into a hierarchical binary), race (made into a continuum of white-good, black-bad), physical ability (some bodies were designated “disposable” while other bodies were proclaimed “normal”), faith, spirituality and religion (christianity asserted and anointed itself as the supreme religion). This meant that bodies that were assigned identities of white, male, christian, and able-bodied were classified as supreme and they became the standard against which the worth of all other bodies was measured.
This lie called the “white race” was invented and then recrafted over and over by those in power in very brutal ways for a long, long time. These lies were evil spells about belonging and worth. These lie.spells separated people from land and from one another, from themselves and from other living beings on the planet. They made people numb and made them sleepwalk through life. These lie.spells made them turn on one another, on our animal kin, and on other living beings who were lie.spelled into objects to be controlled and dominated. These lie.spells made people engage in ugly brutalities which brought trauma after trauma after trauma into our world.
While many people succumbed to these lie.spells, others resisted and fought back. They shook off the sleepwalk, un-numbed their bodies and minds, and refused to believe in power-over and superiority. They stayed rooted in belonging to one another and stayed committed to remembering that if this system of power-over was created it could be un-created. They believed that there were ways past and through and beyond hierarchies of worth and belonging to re-membering and re-sensing our entanglement and power-with, rather than power-over.
These people created their own spells from their various brilliant and beautiful capacities…the story tellers and vision makers, warriors, healers, medicine folks, architects, carpenters, scientists, witches…they made potions and cast spells that made the invisible system visible, they forged all kinds of tools to build different kinds of systems, they carved powerful instruments to sing numb beings back to life, they learned martial arts and defended one another from attacks and they kicked and punched and screamed power-over systems into dust and rubble, they chanted and meditated, danced and time traveled, gathered ancestors waiting to link arms and hearts, they grew gardens and made food and medicine and healed the wounds that this horrible system inflicted.
These people’s spells crafted stories to sing, dance, chant, whisper, and share in order to remember to never believe the lie.spells of power-over systems again.