Breaking the Mold: Afro-Indigenous Gender Justice Workshop

How does gender live in the body? How does it shape the way we organize and build community? Can we break free from limiting paradigms to embrace the complexity of our whole selves?
Breaking the Mold explores gender beyond the binary from an Afro-Indigenous embodied lens. We invite you to cultivate a deeper understanding of LGBTQIA2-S topics that include SOGIE (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity & Expression), intersections of race and gender justice, unpacking binarism, decolonized gender frameworks, and tools for #QTBlackLivesMatter art activism. This workshop is open to anyone interested in exploring gender justice through an intersectional lens using art, movement, and storytelling to expand their practice as an arts/ cultural worker.
Breaking the Mold: Afro-Indigenous Gender Justice Workshop is a part of #DignityInProcess: FREEDOM SCHOOLS, which honor the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement’s 1964 Freedom Summer. #DignityInProcess: Freedom Schools create learning spaces centering an LGBTQ arts-based curriculum known as Afro-Indigenous Liberatory Practice. This takes the shape of ongoing workshops, healing circles, and political education teach-ins steeped in ritual, storytelling, and movement. (Learn more about #DignityInProcess and the applied cultural equity framework below.) This workshop is made possible through EAP's MADE Incubator partnership with ChE, Founder/ Artivist Director of #DignityInProcess.
*NOTES ABOUT ENTERING THE SPACE:
This is a sacred space, a space for practicing Freedom! We enter with reverence. You are invited to bring something for our collective ancestral altar. You will be able to take it home with you at the end of the workshop. Please wear clothing you can move and stretch comfortably in. Please come as fragrance/scent-free as possible to honor the accessibility of the space. #DignityInProcess: FREEDOM SCHOOLS intentionally center cultural frameworks of TQGNC people of African/Creole/Native American descent.  Deep gratitude in advance for your honoring of the space and our shared learning.

Applied Framework: AFRO-INDIGENOUS LIBERATORY PRACTICEArtivist and Transformative Consultant ChE utilizes an African American/ Afro-Diasporic/ Creole/ First Peoples lens of equity organizing known as Afro-Indigenous Liberatory Practice. With strong roots in the ring shout as a source of power and resistance for free and enslaved Africans and Native Americans (particularly in Congo Square, New Orleans), this framework carries Afro-Indigenous medicine from throughout the Americas, West Africa, and the West Indies. Afro-Indigenous Liberatory Practice* roots intersectional justice in the body by centering collective healing through multidisciplinary arts engagement, ancestor reverence, and cross-generational dialogue. Bringing together circles of LGBTQI communities and people-of-color, this unique model offers culturally responsive, sustainable strategies in the realms of the arts, activism, education, and social innovation. 
#DIGNITYINPROCESS:
A pilot for Afro-Indigenous Liberatory Practice, #DignityInProcess is a nationally touring artivist toolkit in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, drawing upon the practices that have sourced the resilience of our ancestors for generations. This multidisciplinary platform merges art activism, ancestral healing, and intersectional identity evolution within the Afro-Indigenous Diaspora. Through Art Actions, site-specific performance rituals merged with direct action organizing, we call in the power of the ring shout, storytelling, movement, call and response to help us remember our sacred origins. Forming Wisdom Councils of Mixed Race, African-Native American, and Creole elders, multi-generational conversations lay the foundation for embodied accountability to sustain a movement of Black Liberation. Returning to the power of the circle, we build Freedom Schools embracing community learning in radical Black Feminism. Afro-futures emerge as we collectively celebrate the dignity of Black life.About the facilitator: ChE is a Queer GNC Afro-Indigenous artivist weaving ancestral healing, transformative consulting, and social-engaged artmaking. ChE is an honored Fellow for the 2017-2018 Intercultural Leadership Institute celebrating their unique intersectional justice framework, Afro-Indigenous Liberatory Practice. Creator of the Underground Railroad: Liberatory Coaching for Creative Radicals of Color, ChE supports (QT)POC artists, activists, and innovators in charting a path to freedom. As the co-founder/host of the BGD podcast, Spirit Medicine, ChE provides accessible wellness tools and rituals centering (QT)POC. Rooted in multigenerational community, ChE founded the Art Liberation Troupe, a QTPOC youth performance group utilizing mentorship, dance, guerilla theatre, and political education workshops as tools for social change. ChE’s work as a cultural organizer includes Breaking the Silence: Teen Salon, Q.E.A.R., Black Folks Dinner, Emergence, #BlackHealingMatters, and The New Orleans Loving Festival. As a director/ choreographer, ChE’s work is robust with gospel soul sounds and movement of the African Diaspora that leave feet stomping and hands clapping. Brown University’s 2017 Black Spatial Relics Artist-in-Residence, ChE brings their Black Lives Matter artivist toolkit, #DignityInProcess throughout the country—merging site-specific performance rituals, Afro-Indigenous Wisdom Councils, and Freedom Schools celebrating the dignity of expansive Black evolution. Follow the process at http://che-art.life/