Decolonizing Antiracism: Indigenous Imagination for Our Future

By: The JTM Team

Any movement toward racial justice in the United Church of Christ must engage the patterns and practices of colonization upon which the United States was founded, and which continue to shape our imagination of who we are and what justice looks like.

Our churches and Christianity itself have played a significant role in establishing, perpetuating, and justifying settler colonialism.  So, our churches also have a significant role to play in decolonizing not only our minds, bodies and spirits, but also our work for racial justice.

As with all justice-making, the people best equipped to lead us in this work are the people most impacted by the injustices that demand our attention and amends.  So this collection of stories, resources, toolkits and webinars centers Indigenous scholars, theologians, communities and activists to guide us as we all take up our roles in this ongoing work.

This series seeks deepen our movement toward racial justice by exploring questions like:

  • How has settler imagination and colonizing impulses shaped our antiracism work? How can indigenous imaginations and decolonial impulses offer distinct and valuable ways of moving toward racial justice?
  • What are the differences between antiracist practices that seek to challenge and dismantle the logics of slavery and decolonial practices that seek to challenge and dismantle the logics of genocide? What are the points of connection and overlap?  What can we learn from these differences and intersections?
  • If we recognize that one of today’s strategies of settler colonialism is the erasure of indigenous presence, how can our racial justice work not only reckon with the histories and lineages of genocide that live in this land and their ongoing impacts, but also draw on indigenous justice-making practices in the present and imaginations for our future?

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“November is Native American Heritage month, and a good time to honor the legacy of our ancestors, but every day we should stop to think about our country’s beginning and that the United States would not exist if not for a great deal of sacrifice, blood, and tears by Indian Tribes across the country.” – Deb Haaland, US Secretary of the Interior

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