Who we are
We are a group of White, U.S. American, Christian settlers who work to disassimilate from our inherited baseline realities while building mutual stakes with peoples of the global majority in destroying:
White supremacy
Settler-colonialism
Christian dominance
Anti-communism
Capitalism
U.S. imperialism
And any of the other ways in which we hierarchically order differences, like race, culture, disability, class, intelligence, body type, etc.
Specifically we focus on Mormonism and the general culture of Utah as these are cultures that have personally impacted us.
Where we’re headed
We want to live in a world in which many worlds fit—where our ways-of-being don’t directly inhibit or oppress others and the land.
We know for this to be possible we must reckon with the histories of white-supremacist, settler-colonial, imperialist, extractive capitalist violence that has created the nesting dolls of extinction, climate, and biodiversity crises that endanger all life on earth as well as the limited comforts we white, settler Christians in the U.S. enjoy.
We want LANDBACK to Indigenous Peoples, here in the heart of empire and across the world, ushering in “a different relationship to land not premised on ownership but on collective well-being.”
We want reparations to Black and African folks for the ongoing repression they’ve been kidnapped into.
By developing a visceral and collective understanding of how these histories have and continue to harm us, we can build in mutual stakes with peoples of the global majority.
To do this, we know we must disassimilate from white supremacy culture, our rights to wealth and land, and in general become unsettled. We also believe this process can be an ambiguous relief as we submit to letting go of the control that we’ve wielded as an heirloom of our whiteness in this land. This submission can be pleasurable, but it also pushes us into the unknown, which can be terrifying.
We believe we must become comfortable being uncomfortable to get where we are trying to go.
How we get there
As white settlers, we don’t have practice nor many models for how to become race-traitors and accomplices in struggles for Indigenous sovereignty, abolition, and others. We know we must listen to BIPOC leadership and that we cannot rely solely on their emotional labor. Because of this we believe we must take informed risks and establish accountable relationships to call us in when our risks cause harm (which they inevitably will as we are trying-while-white).
For each of us, education and community support have been essential in our paths toward a just, sustainable, and whole world grounded in relationships. So, one major risk we take is to offer online educational events, support spaces, resource lists, and courses to share what we have learned in each of our focused studies.
How we work
We are (so far) a group of three–Amy, Sarah, nic–who are still figuring out who, what, and how we are as a group.
We make decisions by consensus. We work slowly to give time for conversation and deep consideration, while also acknowledging that there is no imaginary future in which the times will be ripe for change. We know that “we must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”