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A different kind of Thanksgiving this Saturday

Annual event is an evening of food and conversation around decolonizing our community
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NEWS RELEASE
GUELPH YOUTH MUSIC CENTRE
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This Saturday, Oct. 19, Guelph community members are invited to come together for a different kind of Thanksgiving. This year is the 15th annual ACT: Decolonizing Thanksgiving Dinner. This giant potluck event will be held at the Guelph Youth Music Centre, 75 Cardigan St., Guelph, Ont.

  • Doors open: 4:30 p.m.
  • Welcoming: 5 p.m.
  • Potluck Dinner: 5:30 p.m.
  • Speakers: 7-8 p.m.

The Decolonizing Thanksgiving Dinner began in 2005 as the Anti-Colonial Thanksgiving Dinner (hence the ACT acronym). This large annual event is an evening of food and conversation around decolonizing our community. We seek to unlearn colonized ways of seeing each other, ourselves, and the land, and to heal relationships between Native and non-Native people. We acknowledge that Canada is founded on genocide, and as settlers, in particular white settlers, we have inherited this history, and the privileges, assumptions and dynamics that go along with it.

“If we want to prevent the future from repeating the past, we need to be contributing to a long-term, community driven, shift in power, from settler governments to grassroots decision making rooted in community and a balance with the natural world,” says Danielle Gehl Hagel, one of the organizing committee members. “Sharing food – especially things people have cooked themselves, and donations from local farmers -- really brings people together, and folks always leave after hearing the speakers feeling energized and ready to make a deeper shift.”

At 5 p.m, the Drum Circle Wiiji Numgumook Kwe will open the evening through ceremony. Then attendees will share in a giant potluck feast before speaker Elwood Jimmy shares concepts from Towards Braiding, a recently published book which is an on-going collaborative process between Elwood Jimmy and Vanessa Andreotti hosted and funded by the Musagetes Arts Foundation. This collaboration involves several modes of relational engagement with Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, scholars, and communities, including visits, gatherings and consultations, addressing the “compass questions” below:

  • What are the conditions that make possible ethical and rigorous engagement across communities in historical dissonance that can help us move together towards improved relationships and yet-unimaginable wiser futures, as we face unprecedented global challenges?
  • What are the guidelines and practices for ethical and respectful engagement with Indigenous senses and sensibilities (being, knowing, relationships, trauma, place, space and time) that can help us to work together in holding space for the possibility of “braiding” work?
  • How do we learn together to enliven these guidelines with (self-)compassion, generosity, humility, flexibility and rigour, and without turning our back to (or burning out with) the complexities, paradoxes, difficulties and pain of this process of healing?
  • What kind of socially engaged and community anchored Indigenous-led arts-based program can support this process in the long term?
  • What are the expectations in terms of responsibilities of the organization to the place/land and her traditional ancestral custodians from the perspective of the local Indigenous communities?

Elwood Jimmy is a learner, collaborator, writer, artist, facilitator, cultural manager, and gardener. He is originally from the Thunderchild First Nation, a Nêhiyaw community in the global north. For close to 20 years, he has played a leadership role in several art projects, collectives, and organizations locally and abroad. In December 2015, he was hired as the program coordinator for Musagetes, and has also commissioned texts on social injustice for its online platform, ArtsEverywhere.

“We would like to use this dinner as a space to foster first steps, meaningful reflection and work towards a process of decolonization,” says Byron Murray, one of the organizing committee members. “We understand that the process of unravelling our colonial ways of being takes time and continual reflection and learning. We are excited to hear from Elwood Jimmy in this, our 15th year of hosting this event.”

Many thanks to the various small local businesses that have contributed annually to this event. Local farms Zocolo Organics, Fourfoulds, Cedardown, Spiral Farm, Ignatius, Plan B Organic Farm have contributed harvest foods for the evening’s feast. Prizes generously donated by locals will be raffled off to raise funds to support Indigenous projects. Childcare is generously hosted by the Guelph Outdoor School and Planet Bean has donated coffee.

This is a free event. Donations will be gratefully accepted and this plus money generated from the raffle will be given to two different indigenous-led initiatives

Childcare and Kids’ Space hosted by instructors from the Guelph Outdoor School. Please bring your children ready to play both outdoors and indoors.

The GYMC is wheelchair accessible, with an elevator to the second floor.

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