About Queer Directions

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What is Queer Directions?

A learning platform connecting queer & allied learners, practitioners and faciltators for tending cultural wellness.

Queer Direction Learning Center hosts learning spaces for tending cultural wellness through intuitive healing arts, nature connection and ancestral connection. This platform aspires to uplift diverse queer folks who teach pathways for deepening cultural wellness. Queer Directions endevours to offer safer and more accessible learning and ritual space for trauma-informed community healing.

With gratitude, these offerings take place on the unceded lands of the Lək̓wəŋən, W̱SÁNEĆ, and neighbouring Indigenous Peoples. We are dedicated to supporting a process of decolonization.

Our Vision

 

As a network of learning facilitators, Queer Directions commits to be responsive, proactive in an ongoing way to practice integrity and alignment with these values:

 

  • Queer Directions learning spaces seek to resource learners with generative, queer, animist and earth-based practices for healing from illnesses of whiteness.
  • Offerings are intended to support learners’ cultivation of inner belonging and co-create queerly relational ways of being together, guided by lineage through stories, songs and spiritual practices.
  • Anti-racist and anti-oppressive analysis guides how Queer Directions supports generative culture building.
  • Regular resource reallocation financially supporting PEPÁḴEṈ HÁUTW̱, an W̱SÁNEĆ ecosystem restoration organization. Learn more at www.pepakenhautw.com
  • Modeling unexpertness and horizontal learning dynamics, acknowledging our collective strength through shared knowledge. We lift each other up.

Decision Making

I, Rue McDonald, am the sole proprietor of this business and is the main animator and architect. The shape and structure of Queer Directions is an emergence from a multi-year process of piloting classes, networking and incorporating feedback from the learning community.

My intention nd commitment is to uplift and amplify voices of folks who may identify as marginalized, BIPOC, gender or sexual diverse divergent from straight/cis, low income or poor, have diverse ability or access needs. I am committed to reducing accessibility barriers to the offerings I create or host and acknowledge this is a process. I take full responsibility in how I chose to animate this commitment.

In future, we will expand governance to a guiding team who will participate as accountability mechanism for the work of Queer Directions and guide economic redistribution collectively. Currently, my accountability team is a network of community leaders, my Airmid’s Almanac podcast team and the mentor team.

What are the Queer Directions?

A central part of my calling in founding The Queer Directions is to honour the the sacred fire festival times, the cross-quarter holidays that make up the fixed crossroads. The wheel of the Celtic year is marked by seasonal themes, rituals and stories that honour the liminality of becoming as humans relating to culture, spaces, animist weather and time. Queer Directions seeks to unearth queerness in myth and project queer thrivance, brilliance and resilience into the past, the present and future through story weaving. Queer Directions seeks to tend cultural wellness, resourcing us collectively to show up for dismantling of old structures that no longer serve and, in turn, contribute to the transformative healing of our communities.

Learn more about Queer Directions

Queer Directions Learning Center hosts learning spaces for tending cultural wellness through intuitive healing arts, nature connection and ancestral connection. This platform aspires to uplift diverse queer folks who teach pathways for deepening cultural wellness. Many of us seek cultural reclamation from a place of exile as queer people and members of diaspora.

We are holding up multiplicity, collective knowledge, relational connection and practicing a learners mindset. As facilitators, we endeavor to offer safer and more accessible learning and sacred space for trauma-informed community healing. Inspired from Kai Chen Thom’s work, we engage a loving justice accountability model because we are committed to fostering cultures of belonging and community relational wellness. We seek to model unexpertness where everyone’s voice is valued equally while upholding community agreements. We want to cultivate a learning culture where we can make mistakes and experiment following play and curiosity while held in community.

When we collectively make agreements that create felt affinity across our individual ways and our facilitators are skilled in holding the integrity of those values, we can hold a learning container. When we reclaim these learning containers, is inherently queer, subversive and remediative because we are recognizing the harm of relational fracturing caused by colonization and healing through relationships with queerness and our respective ancestral teachings.

Queer Animist Wild Seeds

“The self is not contained in any moment or any place, but it is only in the intersection of moment and place that the self might, for a moment, be seen vanishing through a door, which disappears at once.” Jeanette Winterson, Sexing The Cherry, 1989

Queerness is a potent guide to navigating time of transition and change. Mystic animism and queerness are related in thier mutual affinity for presencing with unseen as well as diverse experiences of reality and relationality. We resonate deeply with the work of Queer Nature

in their praxis and writing about this relationship. These ways of relating with unseen ecologies also share deep impacts or erasure and oppression from colonization. We offer that queer animism is vital to creating cultures of wellness in relation to Indigenous land, non-human beings and the unseen.

As the name suggests, Queer Directions is a learning center seeking to explore, inquire into and embody queer ontologies, hermenutics and phenominology. If you are inspired by the possibilities of queer futurities, thriving and emergent culture in the work of decolonization, this could be the right place for you. This work can not be done in isolation. We need collective visioning and cultural production.

Ancestral Connection

We offer that ancestral reclamation can be a wellness resource. For those of us disconnected from ancestral cultures, reclaiming culture in respectful and grounded ways offers skills and tools for weaving us in non-human relationality and holding us in webs of belonging while navigating challenging life transitions. These stories, songs, and practices of our respective lineages are a way of belonging in the world and that’s the magic we hope to share with others.

In engaging with ancestral cultures, we ask that we move slowly and with care. We do not romanticize the past or modern day culture. Instead, we seek grounded research and relationships with knowledge holders in the ancestral lands we wish to connect with. We are respectfully and relationaly reclaiming/ queering ancestral stories, cosmologies and enchanting the world through tracking animist weather, learning reverence for place, the non-human and the unseen beings as well as embodying more reciprocal relationships with the Indigenous nations and land on which we live. We offer this resourcing to kin also seeking belonging in relation to place, land, community and ancestors and hold space for living culture creating alternative life ways from colonial capitalism.

Solidarity Efforts

Queer liberation is tied to the liberation of all! We see cultural reclamation as a response to calls to action by many Indigenous organizers & leaders to revitalize our ancestral cultures in order to find more grounded and resourced ways to show up in solidarity efforts. This commitment to solidarity and bridging movements is a beautiful part of queer culture that we want to proliferate and inform our work.

We hope this work helps us show up for collective healing and justice, land defense and community care in nourishing and reciprocal ways as we deepen our relationships to these lands, the non-human and unseen.

We put this into practice through regular resource reallocation financially supporting PEPÁḴEṈ HÁUTW̱, a W̱SÁNEĆ ecosystem restoration organization. Learn More

Decolonization

With gratitude, these offerings take place on the unceded lands of the Lək̓wəŋən, W̱SÁNEĆ, and neighbouring Indigenous Peoples. We are dedicated to supporting a process of decolonization.

What is settler colonialism and decolonization?

Settler colonial systems use genocide to reproduce a certain configuration of relationships to impose land-management and state governance built on white supremist capitalism, but these systems and cultures are fragile, incomplete and impermanent. Decolonization is the processes by which human and non-human systems/ecologies move towards emancipation from systems of colonial domination and, ultimately, decolonization means the re-matriation of Indigenous lands and making space for Indigenous movements of resurgence.

What is decolonial praxis?

Queer Directions takes two pronged approach to decolonial praxis, while aknowledging there are many aspect of decolonization we do not address through our work.

First, we share in place-based solidarities rooted in shared commitment to healing and expanding wild places aka Indigenous food systems. A portion of profits are contributed through our donor relationship with PEPÁḴEṈ HÁUTW̱ Nursery & Garden growing healthy and traditional foods as well as many native plants for ecosystem restoration projects in various locations throughout the W̱SÁNEĆ homelands.

Second, we center our own healing and decolonization of our lineage connection as one facet of dismantling settler colonial systems. SENĆOŦEN word for settler translates to “the hungry people”. We feed ourselves so that we’re not hungry – taking up space and resourcing at the expense of others- but instead cultivate wellness and gifts to offer the land and liberation movements.We can avoid appropriation by nurturing healthy pride and belonging in our ancestral cultures woven into present day relevance.

We presence the unseen colonial realities of place and become practiced in consensual and accountable relationships with Indigenous land. We do this by learning the history of colonization and contributing practically to rewilding land as one way of supporting Indigenous resurgence. “Decolonial love is a practice that bears witness to the past while looking towards a transformative and reparative future by unraveling coloniality, the matrix of power that is manifested in our contemporary conceptions of power, gender, and bodies.” Yomaira C. Figueroa, 2015

“We search together, helping each other grow. We do the work of love.” bell hooks, 2004

Honouring Liminality and Initiation

On the Queer Directions (The Cross Quarter days of the Celtic calendar) a cohort of collaborators shares interactive story-telling ritual space at Sacred Fire Festival community gatherings. These theatrical gatherings celebrate the queer liminal times of seasonal change on the wheel: Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh and Samhain. Through embodiment, dance, music and story-telling, we share a rhythm of ancestral stories connected to seasons that deepen our relationships with these transitory and initiatory times.

In colonial cultures, rites of passage are scarce, lacking depth of witness and often connected to the perpetuation of oppressive systems. Queer Directions tends the work of rites of passagoffers community witness and support through times of change and transition as a way of honouring and wayfaring us through the liminal and unknown waters of transformation and weave a more just and liberatory culture. We have found our communities in big need of such witnessing and seek to propagate cultures that hold intentional space to guide, support and resource those in life transitions and bring together communities to witness seasonal liminality and change. Deep witnessing through rites of passage can be for those in grief, those changing their name or gender identification, those birthing and dying. Offering rites of passage validates that our transitions are important and teaches us that we are worthy of community care offering authentic compassionate witness.