The Journal of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America July-September 2017 - 15

conFlIcT TransFormaTIon
in the decade in which they were born, the 1980s sing the
theme song from Sesame Street. Over in the 1940s, they sing
"I'm Looking over a Four-Leaf Clover." It's the largest group
and in the middle of the group, one woman is crying into the
arms of another. She is Moon-Ja, of Korean origins. To her,
our song, Que será, será sounds like something else; not Spanish
but a Japanese song she learned as a child. I move over to help
care for her.

"Back inside, we set up sacred space and
gathered together our intentions, settling
into discomfort as a place of learning: to
understand colonisation and decolonisation
within the gob-smackingingly arrogant
concept of the Doctrine of Discovery..."
She is in distress. Almost thirty-five years into the Japanese
occupation, she was born, given a Japanese name, learned Japanese songs. Her younger sisters, born post-occupation, were
given Korean names; she kept her occupier name, a reminder
of the pain of occupation, of grief and loss and dislocation,
so present.
Back to the 1950s. "So you did that intentionally, right?"
Michael asks. What? That we ask questions skewed towards
the dominant culture with expectations that you've been here
long enough to "get with the programme," assimilate? Perhaps,
yes. Sidelined again.
In a workshop provocatively entitled "Colour-coded: Decolonising Hearts, Minds and Spirits," 29 participants spent an April
Friday evening and all day Saturday exploring issues of race and racism. Here
in this country, we have seen branch
plants of Black Lives Matter, rising up
in distinctively Canadian forms.
We have lived through, observed,
the submission to Parliament of the
report of the Royal Commission on
Aboriginal Peoples (1996), its 4,000
pages and 440 recommendations going
mostly nowhere, and then the seven
years of Truth-and-Reconciliation storytelling, gut-wrenching testimonies of

150 years of European settlers attempting to "kill the Indian
in the child."
We began on a sunny but crisp Friday afternoon, forming
a circle in the still dormant gardens of a Toronto area United
Church. Renée Hill-Thomas, Elder of the Six Nations of the
grand River Territory, gathered the men, keepers of the fire,
to light the four sacred grasses, huddling against a stiff breeze,
smudging our circle in a ceremony of grief-cleansing. Women,
keepers of the water, passed a cup of water, allowing some of
it to pass through our chilled fingers, purging pain.
Back inside, we set up sacred space and gathered together
our intentions, settling into discomfort as a place of learning:
to understand colonisation and decolonisation within the
gob-smackingingly arrogant concept of the Doctrine of Discovery3 ("flags piercing the skin of our land," they say), to get
at what we bring and what we seek, doing the personal as a
gateway into the systemic, grasping the necessity to not run
away from difficult conversations.
In the hours that followed, we examined issues of identity,
what shapes us, what conditions us, how we learn to "other" the
other, how we arbitrarily exclude and include, how to identify,
interrupt and disrupt unconscious bias, the unmerited privilege
dominant cultures harvest without thinking, the systemic reach
of personal prejudice.
Using a tool called "Creating a Violent Society," we examined in small groups the intersectionality and common roots of
all oppressions, laughing hysterically at times as we traversed
this dangerous territory; through story-telling by Michael Blair
and Renée Hill-Thomas as well as Reginald Crenshaw-African-American, Anglican and a monk, presenting race as both
social construct and social contract.
It is not DNA that puts some people at one end of a continuum racialised to privilege and, at the other end, to not-privilege.
Please see "Colour-Coded" on page 16

Training participants bring the
Sacred Circle inside for sharing. Under the farleft board are Lee McKenna (left) and LeDayne
McLeese Polaski, BPFNA Executive Director.
Photo by Laura McAlpine, an intern for Partera
International.

Baptist Peacemaker

jul-sep 2017 15



Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Journal of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America July-September 2017

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The Journal of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America July-September 2017 - 24
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The Journal of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America July-September 2017 - 30
The Journal of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America July-September 2017 - 31
The Journal of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America July-September 2017 - 32
http://www.brightcopy.net/allen/peacemaker/38-1
http://www.brightcopy.net/allen/peacemaker/37-4
http://www.brightcopy.net/allen/peacemaker/37-3
http://www.brightcopy.net/allen/peacemaker/37-2
http://www.brightcopy.net/allen/peacemaker/37-1
http://www.brightcopy.net/allen/peacemaker/36-3
http://www.brightcopy.net/allen/peacemaker/36-2
http://www.brightcopy.net/allen/peacemaker/36-1
http://www.brightcopy.net/allen/peacemaker/35-4
http://www.brightcopy.net/allen/peacemaker/35-3
https://www.nxtbook.com/allen/peacemaker/35-2
https://www.nxtbook.com/allen/peacemaker/35-1
https://www.nxtbook.com/allen/peacemaker/34-4
https://www.nxtbook.com/allen/peacemaker/34-3
https://www.nxtbook.com/allen/peacemaker/34-2
https://www.nxtbook.com/allen/peacemaker/34-1
https://www.nxtbookmedia.com