 is living on land that was once the home to hundreds of thousands of indigenous people. Since time immemorial they lived in ways that respected the web of life and the more than human ones who depended on it. I am living on the stolen lands of the Esquimalt and Songhees nations myself and as a settler with European ancestry I am learning the shared history of this region in order to walk in a better way. I am grateful for the ways in which indigenous people cared for the life giving water, the ancient trees, the abundant salmon and so much more. Gifts that are now threatened by a value system that sees them mostly as resources to be consumed. I came across this piece of history just this last week that I thought I would share with you tonight. If you've ever been to southern Vancouver island in the spring, you may have been fortunate to see the beautiful blue Camus lilies in bloom especially where there are remnants of Gary Oak meadows. Camus have tasty bulbs under the soil and were an important carbohydrate for First Nations diets pre-colonization. Historically indigenous women employed expert cultivation techniques to help Camus meadows thrives such as the cultural burns which were outlawed by the provincial government. Camus thrive in the Gary Oak ecosystem which is unique to British Columbia but 95% of that ecosystem has been lost. Ethnobotanus Nancy Turner estimates First Nations on Vancouver Island and the smaller adjacent islands may have once harvested as many as 10 million Camus bulbs per year. They cultivated for abundance and understood the responsibilities to harvest honourable. At a Coatson village site on Salt Spring Island, the mountain side was once covered in thousands of Camus which turned it blue every spring. Pre-contact population was thought to be around 15,000 people and in her research Turner found that even just a few decades ago everyone at a Coatsons feast would have had two or three Camus bulbs on their feast plate putting food stores in the tens of thousands. Today just 40 Camus remain on the mountain because much of the Gary Oak ecosystem has been cleared away. Most indigenous people have not tried Camus though some older people have memories of it when they eating it when they were younger. I'm here today because of colonization and going forward I am committed to supporting indigenous perspectives and aiding and bringing awareness of and uplifting the current generation of indigenous peoples who are catalysts for a decolonized future. I imagine a world where everyone is indigenous to place where earth and all her beings are seen as kin and where once again Camus is eaten in the feast halls. May it be so. And I have the pleasure of introducing Ruth because Ruth Wamsley is to lead us in some spiritual grounding this evening. Ruth is a member of the Religious Society of Friends the Quakers and a passionate activist for social justice and environmental justice. She is the mother of two adult children. In September of 2021 her concern about the climate crisis motivated her to engage in spiritually rooted nonviolent civil disobedience as part of a multi-faith prayer circle direct action group which she founded in 2018. This led to her arrest and incarceration for nine days at the Alloette Correctional Center for Women in BC. For Ruth singing with others is a source of great joy and an increasingly important vehicle for emerging her spirituality with her activism. Ruth. Thank you Susan and it's my honor to offer some words of prayer and a song to begin our evening together. So maybe we can just start with a breath and just a moment of silence. Great spirit of all life. Thank you for this opportunity for us to all be gathered together in community to listen to learn and to share with one another what is in our hearts. We come together this evening with a heavy awareness of the great tensions and pain which is manifesting in the world right now. We pray for relief for the suffering due to violent conflicts and environmental disasters. We know that what lies at the root of this suffering is our disconnection with the earth and with one another. We pray for our hearts and minds to be opened to the reality that all of creation is truly interconnected. In the words of Louis Thomas there are no solitary beings. The whole planet is one giant living breathing cell with all its working parts linked in symbiosis. I'm inspired by the words of Thich Nhat Hanh. You carry mother earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother earth is not just your environment. In that insight of inter-being it is possible to have real communication with the earth which is the highest form of prayer. I'd like to share a song with you that I learned this summer at a Quaker gathering in Oregon called I Am The Ocean. It's quite short so I'll sing it through three times and I invite you to sing along with me in your own space even though we're all muted. Hopefully you can pick it up as it goes along. Thank you so much Ruth. A beautiful beginning for all of us. In this world at this troubled time I have the pleasure. My name is Janet Gray for those of you that don't know me and I have the pleasure this evening to introduce our speaker for this evening. I was fortunate this past year to immerse myself for months in a book that I also had the pleasure of talking about and studying with a group of seven friends on a weekly basis. As season climate activists we all have a lot of collective grief for this world and this book not only acknowledged this grief but challenged us to sit with this knowledge, talk about it, work with it and face what's coming together. It was and is a book for our times. It is a workbook because we all have a lot of work to do. The author of this book I speak of is of course our keynote speaker this evening. Dr. Vanessa Andriotti is the Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. She is a former Canada research chair in race inequalities and global change and a former David Lam chair in critical multicultural education. Vanessa has worked extensively across sectors internationally in areas of education related to global justice, global citizenship, critical literacies, indigenous knowledge systems and the climate and nature emergency. Vanessa is the author of Hospicing Modernity, Facing Humanities Wrongs and the Implications of Social Activism and one of the founders of the gesturing towards decolonial futures arts research collective. Dr. Andriotti is a big picture thinker. She is a gifted educator and we are thrilled and honored to have her speak with us this evening. She is a prophet of this time. Vanessa presents everyone she speaks to with a challenge to grow up, step up and show up for ourselves, our communities and the living earth and to interrupt the modern behavior patterns that are killing the planet we're part of. She is a midwife assisting with the birth of something new. What will this look like? Take a deep breath, listen deeply and see where her words and ideas take you. Over to you, Vanessa. Thank you so much, Janet and Ruth. I'm still a bit shaky with the song. So I'm going to try to calm my body so that I can do this in a good way or maybe this is part of it. My name is Vanessa Andriotti. I come from a mixed heritage family with both German and indigenous ancestry from Brazil, but I identify as a settler here in La Cuerna speaking of indigenous people's territory, especially the Songhis and the Squamore people as well as the Hussein age and other La Cuerna speaking nations that surround the place where the University of Victoria is located. And the Guarani people of my mom's side have also taught me a different language, an acknowledgement that is a day long. We're not going to go there. We're going to just do a very short version of it because there are four different acknowledgements that need to be made before I can start this where it needs to start, which is from my body, which is also the land in the sea and the seaweed. So the first acknowledgement is the acknowledgement of the land as a living entity, not a property or a resource in a land that is currently facing many challenges in terms of its ability to keep us alive in the long term and other species as well. The second acknowledgement is the acknowledgement of our ancestors and ancestors are those who have come before us, but also those who are yet to come. And we are also ancestors in the making. So there's an invitation there to become good elders and good ancestors for all relations. And this means sometimes working with the ancestors who have come before us and saying, the buck stops here for some of the things that have happened, as well as bringing the ancestors who are yet to come into the conversation and having them have a space amongst us. The third acknowledgement is the acknowledgement that we are here because other people have worked and the land has worked for us to be here. The ancestors have conspired for us to be here. And in this acknowledgement, we acknowledge all the indigenous people who are the custodians of the territories where everybody here is located. And we also acknowledge the violence, systemic and structural and historical violence that has taken place to allow us to even have this communication using this technology. So thinking about the communities where these minerals were mined and our responsibility to interrupt that violence and other forms of violence that are erupting right now. We are in a moment that is very difficult. There's a lot of suffering and a lot of pain that is going on in the body of humanity and the metabolism of the earth. So being present to that pain is extremely important and developing a different relationship with that pain is also important. And the last acknowledgement is the acknowledgement that we're all a big family of human and non-human beings. We're just points in a continuum and that as with any family, it's a difficult situation in terms of family relations. But at this point, our human actions are actually putting us on the path of premature extinction. So there is a call for us to be together right now that is not the same call that has been issued before. This is a very different call where the future is at stake. So with this spirit, I'm going to share a few things about the work of the collective that I work with, which is the gesturing towards the colonial futures collective and then invite you to a conversation after that. And I am going to speak for about 30 to 40 minutes or depending on how it goes, it can be even a little bit less. But I'll share my power point with you if I can find the the thing that shares the power point. I cannot find it, which is interesting because it has to found it. I've done this so many times and it always gets me. Okay, so here it goes. So the title of the presentation today is Harvesting Hope in a Time of Drought and we will actually be talking about hope more towards the end of the presentation. Before that, I'm going to try to take you on a journey. And I need to acknowledge that all this work that you are seeing here is not just my work, it's the work of a collective and we will talk a little bit about that in a second. And there are three things that if you want to look further into what I'm saying, there are three resources that I'm showing it now and I'm going to show you at the end as well. The first is the book, Cospicy Modernity, that is the basis of this work. But there's also a report called Moving with Storms, Climate and Nature Catalyst Program of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC. This is the report of the last year, 2022-23, where we had a program about the climate and nature emergency centered on seeing the climate and nature emergency as having its origins in colonialism and capitalism. And in the program, we tried to amplify Indigenous critiques of the climate crisis and amplify the voices of Indigenous people in terms of solutions as well. And then lastly, there is this Facing Human Wrongs course, which is called Climate Complexity and Relational Accountability, which is offered through UVic to the community. And we're going to talk a little bit about that there too. And what I'm going to do is just send you the PDF with all the slides, but also the links if you want to know more about these resources. So as was written in the invitation, in the invitation, you had this quote from the report, from the Moving with Storms report that says that the world as we know it is unsustainable. We are in a state of overshoot, consuming more resources than Earth can regenerate and polluting beyond nature's assimilative capacity. This will force a series of major adaptations and almost certainly lead to reduced standards of living both in Canada and other countries of the so-called Global North. Prevailing economic systems dependent on continuing economic growth are likely to be challenged and much remediated both in response to overshoot and a growing clamour for justice. And this was a letter submitted to the UBC Campus Vision Strategy from the Emeritus College who were part of the program of the Moving with Storms catalyst program. So this was really interesting and I'll just say this as an anecdote. We had six cohorts in the program, so we had a cohort of undergraduate students, 12 of them, a cohort of graduate students, a cohort of artists, a cohort of scholars, a cohort of staff, and a cohort of emeritus and emeriti who are retired academics. And each cohort worked with their own people throughout the year, but they had lunches every month where we all got together. And each lunch was hosted by one of the cohorts. So the first lunch that we had was hosted by the undergraduate cohort. And as hosts, they could put questions on the table that they wanted people to discuss. And the questions of the graduate cohort were very hard questions. So they wanted people to talk about, for example, how is your discipline, which could be STEM, math, English, how is your discipline complicit in the creation of the climate in nature emergency? And most of the people who were there, including graduates, students and other scholars, nobody wanted to talk about that. They wanted to talk about solutions and to talk about positive things. So the undergrads who were the youngest in the room felt really upset about that. And what happened that day was that the emeritus cohort, the cohort of retired professors, also came to talk to the younger people and said, why are you being so negative? And throughout the year, the cohort, we started calling them the cohort of elders. This cohort of elders really, really committed to listening to the science, to the climate science, to the research about climate change. And after a year listening to our eight months, actually listening to the science, they became more radical than the students themselves. So they were not asking the question anymore, why are you being so negative? What we saw in the last lunch of the program was the elders apologizing to the younger people for not having seen this earlier and saying like that today, they were sorry that in their careers as researchers, they allowed what's happening to happen. And for the young people, it was so important to hear that and to see this connection between the youngest and the oldest in the cohort in a way that they really felt supported. So we invited them then to record a session where they would be, in the end, it was not talking to each other, but talking about their perspectives. And we have that recorded. I can put that on the chat at the end of the presentation. But this was one of the things that really moved me to emphasize the importance of multi-generational and intergenerational conversations about this topic. What happened to the people in the middle, like the artists did their own thing, they were a separate category, but the scholars, the staff and the graduate students, they didn't have the same kind of shift in perspective. Also, because you have your careers, you are much more invested in the current system than people who are either starting or at the end of their careers. So there were lots of lessons there about the availability or the willingness of people to sit with the difficult questions. But sitting with difficult questions is actually what we're going to be talking about today and our capacity to hold space for difficult things without feeling overwhelmed, immobilized, demanding quick fixes or to be rescued from discomfort. That is the starting point for us to be able to work together, for us to be able to coordinate in a different way to pose and solve problems in different ways. And that is a very difficult educational question. So what I'm going to do today is just take you into a journey of the kinds of work that my collective does in that regard. And here actually there was a question at the end of this slide. This being today's reality, how do we prepare ourselves to tackle the problems of our time, including unprecedented complex dilemmas and disasters of our own making that we'll have to face together? And I will tell you from the beginning that we have a provisional response from our collective that is called SMDR. And SMDR is a compass. And this compass is about emotional serenity or slash sobriety, relational maturity, intellectual discernment and intergenerational responsibility. And we will come back to this slide towards the end, but we will enrich this understanding and talk about what we mean by these things towards the end. So I'll start by talking a little bit about the collective that I work with. It is a transdisciplinary multi-generational collective of researchers, artists, educators, students and Indigenous and after-descendant knowledge keepers from both the global north and the global south. We work at the interface of questions related to historical, systemic and ongoing violence on the one hand, and questions related to the unsustainability of our current modern slash colonial systems. The collective brings together concerns related to racism, colonialism, unsustainability, economic instability, wealth disparity, global mental health crisis, climate and biodiversity catastrophes, intensifications of social and ecological violence and inequalities, and the likelihood of wider social and ecological collapse. So these are very, very, very heavy issues. And that's why amongst us we have had to create containers that are light and compassionate so that we can carry out this work in a good way. So we are engaged in educational and artistic collaborative inquiry and we have these experiments in arts and education that build containers for the expansion of our collective capacity and stamina to face difficulty and pain and navigate complicity and complexity without feeling overwhelmed, demobilized, demanding quick fixes or to be rescued from discomfort, and without drowning in sadness, anger, frustration, guilt or shame. So while we recognize that the vulnerabilities are unevenly distributed in this work, we have this commitment to saying that no one is left of the hook. This is a humanity problem. So it's a commitment to when we have a critique, this critique implicates ourselves, even if you are black, indigenous or a person of color. So there's no romanticization or essentialization. We are all implicated in this. This is a humanity problem. And we have, we work with loop reciprocity, which means that any income that we generate from talks, workshops and courses goes back to the network of indigenous communities in Brazil and Peru who inspire and who support this work. So I'm going to just show three of the people in the network, three of the leaders in the network that, that are at the forefront of the fight against colonialism in climate change mitigation and adaptation that really inspired the talk today. So one of them is chief Ninoahu Niqui from the Amazon, Acre in the Amazon. He's a global advocate against the financialization of forests. He also is an advocate against carbon trading in the Amazon. Maria Yara Querar is from Peru, from Vale Sagrada in Peru. She's a community leader who is working with the protests against lithium mining in indigenous territories. So Peru opened up the mining of lithium in order to resource the green transition in the global north. And Matheus Trembé, who's from Ceará in Brazil. He's a national leader against offshore wind farms in indigenous waters. And he's also a very strong indigenous food sovereign advocate. So these people are not just helping us intellectually, but also relationally. And generally, what we have is for example, when we have courses with more people, they are doing ceremony in Brazil or in Peru while we're working here with people to try to open the channels so that people can start connecting and listening to the land. And for that to happen, we need to put our egos aside. We need to de-center our egos. We need to disarm our defenses. We need to declutter our distractions. We need to disinvest in harmful condition desires so that the land can speak and dream through us. And that's why we don't say that we're birthing something new. We are just helping midwife it. It's the land itself through our bodies that are also land, but it's the land in the conscience of the land that brings about how we're going to heal from this disease that we are facing right now. So in this collective, I talked about the collaborative inquiry that we have. Our starting point is that the indigenous knowledge is about relationality and the critique of colonialism is what really inspires us. So I'm bringing in the voice of Chief Ninawa here who is saying that colonialism is a cognitive, effective, relational, and neurobiological impairment. He's been talking about it as a degenerative disease based on illusions of separation that have damaged our relationships with our own selves, with each other, with other species, and with the land or the planet we're part of with deadly consequences for all involved. And that while Western society has developed advanced STEM technologies, relational technologies of respect, reverence, reciprocity, and responsibility have been neglected. And he says that the climate catastrophe and biodiversity apocalypse we are facing are not technical, but relational problems. And that the mindset that has led us into this predicament and not guide us towards a solution. So Chief Ninawa also talks about the colonization of our unconscious, how modernity and colonialism has imprinted in us imprints and patterns that are very, very difficult to interrupt and need to be interrupted collectively. So this is not a problem of information. It's much closer to an addiction to be interrupted than just a matter of giving people information or changing a worldview. The problem is deeper. It's cognitive. It's emotional. It's relational. And that's why education needs to be deeper. It needs to be from the gut. And we talked then in that sense about probiotic education. So in that sense, if we start from the fact that our unconscious has been colonized, our starting point of inquiry is for socially sanctioned denials. And when you work with education as a problem of information, you just present the information and people then change. But if the problem is denial, it's more difficult because if you present the information that people want to deny, generally they shoot the messenger. So we have to find, if the problem is denial, we have to find ways to bypass the defenses of the ego, the defenses of the person. So it's a very different way of working with education. We will talk about that a little bit. But the four socially sanctioned denials are these. The first one is the denial of systemic violence and complicity and harm. The fact that our comfort, securities and enjoyments are subsidized by expropriation and exploitation. They happen at the expense of other people, species and the land. The second one is the denial of the limits of the planet. The fact that the planet cannot sustain exponential growth and consumption indefinitely. We have already offshot six out of nine planetary boundaries. The third one is the denial of entanglement. Our insistence in seeing ourselves as separate from each other and from the land rather than entangled within a living metabolism that is biointelligent. And the fourth is the denial of the magnitude and complexity of the challenges we will need to face together, which is the tendency to look for simplistic solutions that make us feel and look good and that may address the symptoms, but not the root causes of our collective hyper complex, wicked predicament. Wicked is a term that is used in complexity science for problems that are multi-layered, that where one solution in one layer creates a problem in another layer and where people who are creating the problem are also people who are offering the solution. So it's very useful to look at wicked challenges in that way. Then our starting point too is that we have three different understandings and again we believe that different communities, different collectives will have different understandings of things and I'm presenting the understanding of our collective. So our collective understands colonialism as the imposed sense of separation between humans and the rest of nature, which creates hierarchies of value, which creates subjugation and cognitive affective and relational neurodegenerative impairments. For example, we see the land as property and then that leads to exploitation, expropriation, destitution, dispossession, ecocides and genocides. Then we talk about neuro-colonization. It's how our ways of thinking, doing, hoping, relating and being, our affective physiological responses and our libidinal attachments, how we source pleasure and comfort and our fears and insecurities are systematically wired, limited and impaired by modern colonial systems, by our current systems. And then neuro decolonization, it's about moving humanity towards neuro-physical and epigenabic regeneration, geared towards relational intelligence, the intelligence that indigenous people have cultivated for millennia and intergenerational accountability, which comes from relational intelligence, which means facing our complicity, navigating complexity, rewiring the unconscious, disinvesting in harm, mobilizing reparations, and activating exiled capacities for sobriety, maturity, discernment, and responsibility. That's the SMDR. So, I will just go through with you some technologies of inquiry that we have in our collective. They're just for examples of these technologies that help create the containers for us to have these conversations without relationships falling apart and without us drowning in the pain or the anger or the guilt or the shame that may come with it. And these technologies, remember when I talked about if the problem is denial, it's different, an indication is trying to address it, it's different from information. So, we're going to be using a lot of metaphor and story, also being inspired by indigenous peoples who are part of the collective and the communities in the south about how to use a different part of the brain to be able to hold the information about the complexities and complicities that are inherent in this work. So, the first technology of inquiry that I'm going to show you is the bus within us. This has been extremely important for people to be together in a space and be present to the complexity of the space. They need to diffract reality. And in order to diffract reality, when you diffract something, it's like light going to a prism. So, if a ray of light goes into the prism, you see the different colors of the rainbow, right? The same thing we need to do with the reality around us and also the reality within us. So, we call it self-defraction or psychodynamic self-assessment. These are the technical terms for it. But basically, we invite people to see their own complexity by seeing themselves as a bus. And it could be another image, but the bus works really well. We've been using it for a lot of time. And generally when people use other images, they end up in the bus as well. And the image doesn't matter. What matters is that you see the plurality of responses within you. So, if you are a bus and there's a driver and there are lots of passengers. So, there's passengers at the front of the bus that who you know very well. So, voices that you're hearing in your head about opinions that you may have about something that may come from people very close to you or teachers. But they also disagree, right? And there are people in the middle of the bus who you hear sometimes. And there are people at the back of the bus who might be trying to hide from you. So, there are things that you're repressing. Might be repressing at the end of the bus. And the invitation is for you to look back and hold space for the bus, for your own bus. And you ask, what are people saying? What are they thinking? How are they feeling? How they are interacting each other? How old are they? Are they speaking from fear? Are they speaking from trauma? Do they sound like somebody you know? Do they sound like a grandma? Do they want things to be black and white? Can they tolerate ambiguity? Do they trust the driver? And as you develop this vocabulary to talk about things that are happening or to hold space for things that are happening within you, you are also developing a vocabulary to talk to other people about what you are observing in your bus and what you're learning from observing your bus. So, that creates a situation where when we have a group conversation, people can say, there's a conversation on my bus where one passenger is saying A, the other passenger is saying B, and the other passenger is saying C. And I'm observing this thinking D. So, you can bring complexity to the conversation and people can express things without fear of losing face. And when they do that, what we say generally is that if you can't hold space, if you can't sit with your own complexity, there's absolutely no chance you can sit with the complexity around you. You are going to, and if you can't sit with the complexity within you or around you, what you are going to try to do is to flatten the complexity, impose coherence in order to have some certainty. And then because that repression is difficult, repression and this editing out of reality actually takes a lot of time and a lot of energy, you get very attached to the certainties that you have created by imposing coherence on reality. And then that becomes, that makes it very difficult for people to have conversations when they are very attached to their opinions and they see their opinions as a reflection of their identity. So through the bus, we ask people to diffract to make their identities much more plural so that they can relate to each other. And then in the advanced methodology of the bus, once we learn to go deeper in this kind of inquiry, there are several decks of the bus. And in other decks, we have our ancestors. We have the whole of humanity in your bus. We have humanity and the more than human. And in another deck of the bus, you may have us beyond space and time, like not in the bodies anymore. So you can take the metaphor or the methodology to many different spaces. And we also have the methodology as a way to talk about learning in the different way using images. So we may ask people, how's your bus today? And people may say, oh, I'm just going round and round about or my bus has fallen into a ditch today or it's in the garage. There's no gas. There's a flat tire. So you have this different ways of expressing that not only give you more possibilities in terms of vocabulary, but also it uses a different part of the brain. And that's what we actually we need a different chemistry of learning and of being together and of talking if we're going to deal with the kinds of issues, difficult and painful issues that we have to deal with in terms of the climate and nature emergency and inequalities and colonialism, racism and so forth. So this is the first example of a technology of inquiry that our collective has been testing. Another one is a story called the house that modernity built. So I'm going to tell the story while you what I'm going to ask you and invite you to observe your bus. So as you listen to the story, it's a very short story, I'm asking you to check what kinds of conversations are happening on your bus in your body, in your mind or whatever in your being. How are these conversations happening? So you're doing multiple things at the same time. It's multiple tabs, multitasking. So I'm telling you the story of the house that modernity built and the house of in its it has four parts, the four frames that you have in the screen. The first screen is the first screen of the first frame is the image of a house sitting on a planet and in this frame, the house is exceeding the limits of the planet, is off shooting the limits of the planet. So the house of modernity has a foundation of separability, which is the separation between us and the rest of the planet and the rest of nature. And the separability creates a problem because it removes the intrinsic value of life and then it creates the hierarchies between species, between cultures, between people and without that intrinsic value, you have to be producing value inside the house to be worthy of being alive. So to have that external validation that you are a worthy human being, you need to be working and producing value within the house. There's no intrinsic value. And other species the same, if they are valuable for the house they are protected, if they are not they're not protected and they become resources. So there are two carrying walls of the house. One carrying wall is the nation state, the other carrying wall is universal reason. The carrying wall of the nation state reminds us that the nation state was created, the modern nation state was created to protect capital and property, not necessarily to protect people. So what we see is that human rights, civil rights, indigenous rights are generally dispensed or created by the state when there is interest convergence between the protection of capital and the protection of people. It's not just that the state is there benevolently protecting the people but when it's good for the state to protect capital then it can also protect people. But when it's not good, when the two of them are in competition, generally the state will protect capital. And this is coming from critical race theory and it's a number of studies that have been done mainly in the United States about questions of desegregation of schools, for example, but that theory of interest convergence is coming from there. That just reminds us that the purpose of the nation state is to protect capital in this house. Universal reason is the single story of progress, development and civilization that has the effect of killing other possibilities and other stories. So it's a story that becomes a single story and then creates epistemicides. It kills other possibilities of knowledge and understandings that question the understandings of progress, development, civilization of modern societies. And then the roof today is the roof of global capitalism that is focused on profit at any expense. Some people call it net net capitalism. Some people, it's definitely shareholders, speculative algorithmic capitalism that is very depersonalized and it's just about producing profit for shareholders, right? And we are all implicated in this if we have, if we use credit cards, if we have pensions and it's very unregulated and very difficult to regulate. Before when it was industrial capitalism, governments had much more control over the regulation of capital flows but today with the global market, the speculative markets, very difficult to control. So in this first frame, this house is overshooting the boundaries of the planet. The second frame is about the hidden costs of the house. So inside the house we have unsustainable growth and overconsumption. We have an arrow of expropriation coming from the planet into the house, an arrow of waste disposal going from the house into the planet. In the planet we have destitution, dispossession, genocide and also ecocides. So here the house is subsidized and maintained by violence. In the next frame we have the floors of the house. So we played here with global north and global south but we talked about the north of the north, the penthouse of the house of modernity, people with historical discretionary income. Then there's the north of the south, people with access to social mobility. Then there's the south of the north, which is people who are in the house and they don't have access to social mobility and then we have the south of the south that receives all the sewage of the house, people fighting for a different form of existence. Like chief Ninoa Runikui, who is fighting to remain part of the forest, who remain a voice of the Amazon forest, he doesn't want to live in the house, he wants to live as part of the forest. But then if they come with carbon trading, for example, for the forest, he is forced out of his religion and he is then forced to depend on supermarkets for the food, pharmacies for the remedy and going to school for education. What he says is that the university is our pharmacy or supermarket in our school and these are all western concepts. We don't even consider them like that but it's important to say it like this so that people understand why they don't want to leave the forest and then why they don't want the forest financialized. In the last picture we have climate change, economic instability, consolation of rights, creating structural damage in the house. So in the house we have social, economic, political, ecological and mental health crisis and in the planet we have an increase in violent conflict and then mass and forest migration. So at this point we ask do we fix, do we expand, do we build another house, do we live without the house, do we find more planets. And then when we get to those questions there are generally three types of answers. Either it's the software form of the house or the radical reform of the house or the house is beyond the reform. So soft reform, we say more modernity, same forward, same leadership, small changes. Radical reform, it's still more modernity but then different leadership, larger changes. Beyond reform more modernity is not an option given the violence required and the limits of the planet. So we need to ask different questions and different answers. The problem is that if we have lived in the house for that for very long and we have for several generations what happens is that we are that there is our desires and our fears and our entitlements are all bound up with the house. So for example our fear of scarcity in the house this fear is harnessed and then it becomes a desire for accumulation and that desire is harnessed and it becomes a perceived entitlement for ownership and the same happens with our fear of uncertainty that becomes a desire for certainty that becomes an entitlement to stability. Fear of chaos becomes a desire for control and an entitlement to order. So these loops are extremely difficult to break. So educationally that's why I was saying this is more it's not about just you cannot jump from thinking like this to thinking in a different way because we are bound our desires our entitlements and our fears are kind of bound to the house. They have been conditioned by the house. So it's instead of shifting of perspective it's more like rehab. We need AA for humanity in that sense. The third example is the merry-go-round. So because we our fears and desires and entitlements are all bound when we deal with the climate crisis or questions of inequality we generally stay in the circle where we want safe simplistic feel-good-look-good solutions that sustain the status quo. When we engage with communities that are marginalized we generally engage in tokenistic transactional ways driven by the optics and by consuming what these communities want to give us and then or have available and then we have this ethnocentric narrow and limited imagination of what is possible and desirable. So again interrupting this merry-go-round is an educational problem and it's a problem that education our current educational system cannot cannot address because it actually reproduces the merry-go-round. And I will finish the examples with the example of climate fraud framework that is coming from the federation of the Huniqui people of the Amazon. And that's merry-go-round creates a problem for the climate emergency because it gets us to not be able to imagine beyond the usual. So we have here a number of patterns in climate solutions that are actually making the problem worse. So the first one is carbon colonialism where with carbon offsets and carbon trading we are just externalizing the costs of business as usual. So carbon offsets they give industry the license to keep doing business as usual as they pay other people not to have their forest cut but that is not about reduction of emissions or reduction of consumerism. It's just business as usual with some license. Then there's L which is land grabbing so there's a lot of land grabbing happening in the global south for for so-called conservation and carbon sinks. Then there's indigenous co-optation also in this process because of course indigenous communities are super complex and but then this companies are using indigenous people to say look if indigenous people are doing it it is okay. Then there's mandatory growth and consumerism which is something very difficult to interrupt. There are absurd promises of carbon sequestration, toxic hope in the continuity of violent and sustainable systems, externalization of costs, financialization of nature, regulatory loopholes, arrogant techno solutionism and techno salvationism and the understanding that technology will solve everything. Ubiquitous greenwashing and distorted narratives and deceptive claims including astroturfing which is the creation of this seemingly grassroots organizations that are supporting some climate solutions but actually they were created sometimes through AI to do that. So in that context we have all these complexities on our back like we have increasing weight of the complexity on our back personal, intergenerational, historical, systemic complexities all weighing on our backs and we're trying to hold this stick of unstable certainty, trying to send off the fear, frustration, the resentment, the hopelessness, disillusionment but then we have this wind of climate catastrophe, ecocides and the possibility of human extinction and the intensification of violence and inequalities and of course our backs are going to be broken by this if we don't do something together. So the idea is to have a kind of education that can take this weight from our back and put it in front of us so that we can safely lower it to the ground for the land and then we can collectively hold space for it so we need that kind of education. So in that sense we've been looking for what kind of education could do that and when we compare modern education which is educating the head for the body to follow according to the indigenous people we're working with, definitely that kind of education that can help with that. So we took inspiration from Hunikui education, education of the people of the Amazon which is about educating the gut for the heart to be filled so that the head can follow. So we took inspiration from that and we created this distinction between mastery education and depth education. So mastery education is a technical education. You put tea in the cup, you measure the cup, that is the concepts or the content that you've mastered or it's like conquering a peak and saying and getting the dopamine that you get over there if you've conquered it and the skills that you have mastered and depth education in contrast would be more about peeling the onion, peeling the layers of an onion right but think about a truckload full of onions and then creating a meal with that collectively or instead of conquering a peak deep diving in the ocean to discover that our bodies are water we are also the water that we're diving in and we're also the toxins we're putting in the water that is making the water undrinkable and unlivable for the other creatures of the water who are also us. So in that sense what we're trying to do with depth education is to learn collectively how to walk a tight rope with honesty, humility, humor and hyper self-reflexivity guided by a compass of sobriety, maturity, discernment and responsibility and we're trying not to fall into desperate hope or reckless hopelessness. So desperate hope is hoping the chosen people, a heroic authority, the right ideology, a special practice or a return to a place and time. Reckless hopelessness is about hedonism which is about just letting me live my best life, nihilism, nothing matters, whateverism, misanthropy which is the hatred of humanity and the banalization of brutality. So in that sense the SMDR compass is about, so I said that we would come back to this at the end of the presentation, emotional synanity or sobriety which is about rehab, a disinvestment in harmful condition compulsions in the raising of our emotional threshold, relational maturity is about learning to develop relationships grounded in trust, respect, reciprocity, consent and accountability and our commitment to eldering, to aging and dying well. Then there's intellectual discernment, the capacity to navigate multiple complex moving layers of reality and to respond in accountable ways in the intergenerational accountability which can be summarized as the buck stops here. And I said that I would return to the question of hope. So in the House of Modernity hope is generally hope in the continuity of what's comfortable and familiar. Or hope is that I continue to be protected from the violence of the reality that is necessary for the House to be there. Or hope is an image in the future that I convince others to work towards with me. However, Chief Inouahonikui says that the future depends much less on the images we have in our heads than on the quality of the weaving of our relationships in the present. Our capacity to repair relationships, to heal and to learn collectively, and to weave the present into a different future. So I'm going to finish with this, that the hope worth having is that hope at the other side or at the other end of despair. It's hope in our capacity to repair relations, to wake up, to compost the shit that we have inherited and contributed to, to clean up the mess, to grow up, which may mean to grow down in terms of developing the humility that will be necessary to do this work, to show up differently to one another and to the planet and to coexist differently. So as I said before, we have tried to create a course that invites people to do that. It's a hard course. It's a six-week course that really we say that in the first three weeks we take the the lids off the can of worms and we hide the lids and we have to stay with the worms first in the first three weeks and then in the last three weeks we learn to put the worms back in the land. And if you want to talk about it, I think that that is a very interesting course. And the ask of the course is so hard. The ask is a mask of rehab and we do a number of different things in this course including forest walks and it's an asynchronous course with tutorials that are synchronous but we've learned a lot from inviting people to to do this process. And I think I'm gonna I'm gonna stop here and invite questions and conversation. Thank you so much for listening and for for being open to doing this work. I raise my hands to you. Thank you. Back to you, Janet or Justin. I'm gonna say to Seraf, but thank you so much. That was an amazing presentation. We really appreciate you sharing, sharing your wisdom with us tonight and the wisdom of your collective. So, Janet, are we going to move into the Q&A's now? Yes, we are and thank you very much, Vanessa. We'll encourage people to, I know you've had a lot to sort of digest over the past 40 minutes and it might be new to a lot of you. But if you have a question, please put it in the chat or you can raise your hand in the gallery view here and we'll we'll do it both ways. We've got, we'll just give a minute here for people to sort of respond in some way. Maybe I'll pin it back to, so if you have a question, please do put it in the chat or raise your hand, but we'd have to be able to see your screen too. And maybe we could start with, Susan, do you want to start us off? First, I'll start with a comment. I know the first time I heard this and read the book, it was overwhelming. So, if you're feeling like, wow, this is a lot of stuff for me. I don't even know where to begin. That's really normal and natural. I want to reassure you. The fact that you're here tonight and are willing to listen to this, this is, this is a blessing to us. This is where the work starts, right? This is a safe space where we can start talking about that. You know, when I was listening, I was, I was just picking up key words that you were saying, Vanessa, and like, yeah, that just sort of sprung out and that kind of are easy for me to latch onto. And one of them is we need AA for humanity. And I thought, oh yes, do we ever need this? And I guess the work that you're doing is part of that healing, that part of that work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's, that's a comment I have for tonight. I'm sure others have other comments. It looks like Gertie has something that she's willing to say. So, Gertie, if you'll unmute yourself and ask the question, that would be great. Yes, thank you. And thank you very much, Vanessa. A challenging talk. I was, I also read your book with a group of friends and yeah, it was very, very challenging and, but I just want to ask a question about the bus. You know, we didn't dwell much on the bus. And so did you do that in a group conversation or is it just a matter of your, your own doing it your own self as you encounter things, or as you think about questions to be present to your bus and who's in your bus and what's going on? How did that process work? Thank you, Gertie. It's, we've been using the bus now in the collective for seven years and tracking the, how different people use it. And I think by now we know that the benefits of using it in terms of opening up different vocabularies for conversation are enormous, even in terms of partner relationships. It really helps when you are in a conflict to see, okay, so it's not just two people in a conflict. It's probably, there's a conflict over here in the conflict over there and trying to map the different people who are talking in the, in, generally, if it is a conflict between in a relationship, the ages of the people speaking, because generally there is, there are some youngsters there speaking from trauma and it allows you to actually be compassionate to yourself and to other people's young people in their buses, right? To, and to bring everybody to a space of more sobriety, maturity, discernment and responsibility. And because it is ludic, it is playful, it also removes the charge, the heavy charge that we have on top of things. And in psychology, there is actually a therapy that is very similar, which is called the family system therapy, where you have, you map inside of you who are the children who are still needing support, who are the firefighters who come out to, to fight the fires, who are the protectors and then you have a better understanding of their psychology so that they don't cause harm to your other, to your external relationships. So, from like, again, seven years using it, I can say that this is the baseline that we, if we don't have the bus, because the problem is that we have been conditioned to be, to see ourselves as one person, just coherent, right? And that coherence in communication with other people who are very coherent, when you get into, into a cul-de-sac, when you, when you get into a conflict, it's extremely difficult to disentangle because you lose face and you don't want to do that, right? With the bus, that problem is solved because you are many and the other person is many. There's much more compassion to go around, right? And to bring everybody to a different understanding and because it foregrounds uncertainty, there's much more commitment to inquiry, collaborative inquiry into the problem rather than this problem-solving thing that rushes things, right? We can, we can sit together in a very different way. So I would encourage you to try, try using it. In the course, we use the bus for everything and we, we also invite people to look for the, some passengers who are there, like there are passengers who are seeking certainty and they, they are good for something, like some tasks, they are the best, but some tasks, like for relationships, they are not very, very good with that. There are other passengers who are seeking innocence and they are pushing for that. And if you don't know them very well, sometimes you have a relationship with an Indigenous person and you're kind of, that passenger comes and takes a lot of the space in that relationship too. So when you know they are there, you can deal with them. You don't, so you do the work on yourself so that you don't become, they, these passengers don't become work for other people to deal with, right? And then the relationship becomes much easier. Thanks, Judy. We have another question from Steve. And he says, the climate catastrophe needs relational structure, solutions more than technical solutions. Does this mean new political systems? I think that, that is part of what it needs, for sure. When we talk about new ways of relating, it's the first, it's new ways of relating actually to ourselves, our own selves, right? Figuring out that we are not separate from the land and from each other, that our bodies are land. What Chifinawa says, for example, is that the climate, the, the, the floods and the fires and the famines that are happening out around us are not just happening around us. They are happening within, within us and in different ways. So partly, for example, our bodies, they're full of microplastics already. That's just the materiality of it. The toxins in the water, the toxins in the food, the toxins in the air. So that's part of how we, it's happening within, but also in our unconscious. So if we're not separated from the rest of the planet, if the planet, if the land is hurting, if other people are hurting right now, we are feeling it. It's just that we numb it, right? So once we open up to that possibility and we allow that, that pain to be felt and to move, we have to hold it and process it without drowning in it. And that is, that is an art and a technique for you not to drown in it because it's very easy for us to drown. And it's especially in the culture that says that well-being needs to be free of pain. So we really run away from pain and the running away from pain is very painful too because we are terrorized by pain and the terror of pain that being haunted by pain is more painful than the pain we are trying to avoid. So once we, we can do that, we can be present to reality, we feel that other systems, other political systems from that relationality will emerge, but we cannot think the systems before we feel it. So we need to experience it so that it will come from that. There's no way we can imagine it before we actually do it with our bodies. And that's, I think, a very key issue that not just Chief Ninawai and the communities in Brazil, but I've heard this here in Canada as well, that it's very, it's not a matter of a change of worldviews. It is a matter of a change of a neurochemical, neurophysical change in our bodies that will open up for other possibilities of politics and political systems to emerge. There's a question here that's, oh, sort of is connected to this, and maybe you've already said enough about it, but I'll ask it anyway. It's from Glen and Jackie. Can you say more about the emotional practices that support the many voices in the bus and how you work with emotions of grief? Can you talk a little bit more about that, although you touched on it right now? Yeah, sure. So we, there are different entry points into this conversation, but we also work with polyvangel theory, which is a theory about our central nervous system. And that says that we've been conditioned to operate with emotions in a specific way, and we need to open it up. And so we are processing emotions from the pedosympathetic doors on the nervous system, and we need to shift it to the ventral nervous system for it to be able to flow. So basically when we, we process, when we face difficult emotions, our system within the house of modernity is trained to respond and fight, flight, freeze, or fix. So these are the four, the four responses. And actually what we need before we can fix anything is to just process it. And in the calmness that comes from the ventral nervous system, that's the, the pedosympathetic ventral, not the sympathetic or pedosympathetic dorsal. So we've been working with psychologists to figure out how to invite people into a different neurochemistry of learning where they can expand their capacity to sit with their bus and process all these emotions that are there, accumulated from probably birth, right? Because our culture doesn't have the Western culture is limited in its teachings about how to process difficult and complex emotions. We need to learn it in a different way. And learning to process these things is something that indigenous cultures around the world have had to do it because, number one, they've had to face the violence of colonialism and learn to survive that, right? So that survival is about processing the emotions. I'm talking a lot about the people in the, in Peru, for example, they have plans that help with that, they have practices that help with that, but all these practices are about both parenting, the young people in our bus, but also about learning to hold space for things and feel it and let it go, right? So we talk about acceptance without endorsement, for example, accept the things, let it go, about integrating our bodies to be able to process it collectively as well. We're talking about achieving different levels of conscience and states of mind by sensorial deprivation, for example, when you're fasting or when you go into retreats where you don't talk, vipassana, for example, or when you, so they're going to dark rooms for a long time and or in one of the communities, they bury people and they keep the head out of the land. So there are lots of different practices that we've lost in our society or have not even, maybe they didn't have them, but these practices, they activate capacities in our body for things that we cannot even imagine, but that might be necessary right now for us to process all of these things and this is, this is through the body, this is related to what we eat, to how we drink, how we relate to the food, how we relate to the land that we are stepping on, how we are going to ask permission or not to go into a forest, who we feel accountable to or not, who we are neglecting, all these things start to bear in our personal space when we open up these different channels and the bus really helps with that. Thank you. Thank you. I, this is Janet and I'm just thinking we're getting close to our time here where we want to do some closure, but maybe Justin, do you want to frame one more question either with what Michael's written or your your own? Yeah, I can. So I'm just looking at what Michael wrote in the chat here. He's kind of listed a few different, a few different things here and if you want to speak more of this, Michael, you can, but I look at this at things like the Millennium Development Goals, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Ladato Sea, the fair run approach. Are these things that, you know, do they have a role in hospice and modernity? Are they just keeping the ship afloat? How do some of these things factor into this work that we're trying to do? I think these things were really important before it started, the House of Modernity started to crack, right? So it's, some of them served to expand the House, some of them served to protect vulnerable people within the House, but we are at a different stage of modernity where the, what used to work in the past for the left or for anti-oppression might not work anymore. So what we see, for example, is that moralizing approaches, they have more of a backlash than they are, than they are advancing. We're going through that tipping point. So in, we call it their solid modernity, where these things came from and they were important in protecting rights and protecting the space and in putting getting people from the basement to the stairs of social mobility. However, if the house is falling apart, and if we have the sewage of the house coming through, then we have liquid modernity. And in liquid modernity, it's like, it's the difference between dealing with something solid and having to navigate something liquid. And we need the different, different tools and different sensibility to be able to, to, to swim, then to be able to walk. But in Brazil, we have the same that says that in a situation of a flood, it's only when the water reaches your bum that you can, you are able to swim. Before that you can only walk or wade. So at the end of the day, we will have to swim when it's time for us to do so. But before we, we get to that point, we can learn from some swimmers, indigenous people has been swimmers. But the problem is that they cannot teach us exactly how to swim, because their rivers are different. But they can remind us that it's possible for us to swim. Our bodies are also made for swimming. And by watching and learning and understanding how we contribute to the, the pollution of their rivers that they are swimming in, and the situation of a flood, we can learn much more about the floods that are coming for us. I think I will end on that note. Thank you so much. Thank you. All right. And I think will we leave the Q&As there then, Janet? I think so. Yes. Take it away, Justin. All right. So thank you, everyone, for joining us this evening. This has been a wonderful experience for me. I hope it has been for you as well. Thank you so much, Vanessa, for joining us. This has been both exciting and challenging and enlightening. And it's going to take me some time to sort of sit with us and work through it. And I invite everyone else to the same thing. I think we have a lot to think on and feel through after tonight. I think that's a good thing. So thank you. Thank you so much. A couple of quick housekeeping things before we head off for the night. So again, this evening has been recorded. So we will be sending out the recording to all of you and everyone who has attended. So if you need to rewatch or if somebody had to leave or couldn't make tonight, this will be made available. Also, keep your eyes out for an email coming out probably tomorrow that will have some follow up questions to reflect on as well as a suggested activity to do on Saturday in between our other sessions. And of course, also please do remember that we have both morning and afternoon sessions on Saturday again on Zoom that we invite you and encourage you to attend. You don't have to attend both or any of them, but we hope that you will join as you are able to. So on that note, once again, thank you so much, everybody. And I hope you all have a lovely evening. Thank you. Thank you, Justin.