Tag: Decolonizing

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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Kirsten Ellen Johnsen, PhD

Kirsten’s talk is called “Unsettling our Understandings of Place”

What does it mean to “understand place?” I suggest it is a position of humility and reception. The land holds real spiritual power. The places we live contain and embody ancestral personality. To be in true relationship with place is to recognize the independence of these personalities and ancestries: it is to respect their otherness and agency.

Jung dreamt of a descent through the layers of a house and down through the sediments of the earth below as a way to connect with ancestral and archetypal energies. After visiting America, he noted how white settlers faced a gap in this descent, owing to the discontinuity of ancestry on the land. Several contemporary Jungian scholars also recognize the cultural grief and confusion that settler cultures experience due to ancestral discontinuity, and its deleterious historical effects on both settlers and indigenous peoples.

This workshop is oriented toward the settler-colonial experience. It will discuss the ancestral gap that Jung identified and address how to navigate it with consciousness, compassion, and commitment to counter oppressions.

About Kirsten

Kirsten Ellen Johnsen lives in relationship with Northern Pomo land in what is now known as Mendocino County. The life-journey this land has asked her to undertake has led her into honest reckoning with deep ancestry. She holds a PhD in Mythology and Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute.

To hear Kirsten’s talk and many others, join us at the Mythologium!

The Mythologium is a conference and retreat for mythologists and friends of myth, held July 29 – 31 via Zoom in the Pacific time zone.

Learn more and register
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Mythologium 2022 welcomes Chanti Tacoronte-Perez and Tiffany D. Johnson

Chanti and Tiffany will present “Ecology of Rest: A Decolonial Approach to Remembrance”

Academia plays a vital role in the co-construction and dissemination of knowledge on local and global fronts. Yet, all too often, within academic spaces, there is an over-separation from our soul and an instinct to reject the integration of our multiple layered selves, leaving an insatiable hunger for extrinsic outcomes that exhaust and breakdown.

To begin addressing this rejection of wholeness, we take a decolonial approach to work (broadly) and knowledge (specifically) by honoring “an ecology of rest.” We center the role of an integrated and whole internal inter-being — and we remain curious. Our session will reflect our desire to privilege embodied practice and non-ordinary ways of knowing by combining theory, practice, and collaboration. Our thesis is that connections with these embodied practices are natural and allow us all to tend a more steadfast and integrated internal ecosystem – so that we may be able to flourish within and throughout our ever-evolving external ecosystem.

In this workshop-style session, Participants will be invited and led through a rest practice. To prepare for this journey we ask you to find a comfortable, pleasurable, and protective space to receive. Imagine building a nest to rest in; bring pillows, blankets, cushions, an eye cover or scarf, and a journal; that said, come as you are.

About Chanti

Chanti Tacoronte-Perez is a Cuban-American creatrix, ritualist, and author. She believes that images speak a profound language; her life’s work is a translator of the unseen and advocates for the imaginal. She holds a Masters in Engaged Humanities, Masters in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and is currently working on her dissertation on, navigating the liminal via a creative-divinatory journey as a map to recovering the marginalized, forgotten, and silenced. Her work and teaching centers, imagination, creativity, and deep rest. She teaches workshops and collaborative training focused on creativity, Yantra painting, dreaming, intuitive movement, restorative yoga, and yoga Nidra. Her passion and aim is to inspire all to rediscover their creative self by weaving the blessings with the wounds while honoring the land and the ancestors.

About Tiffany

Tiffany D Johnson is a researcher, educator, and lover of community. Her research focuses on how experiences of inequity and stigma in the workplace facilitate well-being (or a lack thereof). She works as an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at Georgia Tech and she is the creator of WHOLE, A community for Black and Brown women in Academia.

To hear Chanti’s and Tiffany’s talk and many others, join us at the Mythologium!

The Mythologium is a conference and retreat for mythologists and friends of myth, held July 29 – 31 via Zoom in the Pacific time zone.

Learn more and register
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Mythologium 2021 welcomes Dr. Rosalie Nell Bouck

Rosalie’s presentation is called “‘Held Embrujadas’: Reading Mesoamerican Myths of Femininity as a Radical Response to Contemporary Colonialism”

This paper presents a portion of my doctoral research on the cycles of waste land and borderland spaces in Mesoamerican myth. I will share an example of how an unusual reading of key Mesoamerican myths helps us move through collective shadow spaces (waste lands) into periods of reorientation (borderlands) to the whole in order to regenerate culturally and environmentally.

This exploration focuses on the critical role of feminine figures in Mesoamerican myth, which are often direly misunderstood by the Western mind. These strange, beautiful/hideous, death-adorned maternal figures shapeshift throughout myths and over time but they always serve a similar purpose: To guide us through our necessary death/life cycles and into regeneration of our collective psyche and landscape. Cultivating a deep understanding of the waste land/borderlands motif and the “dark” feminine figures at the heart of the Mesoamerican worldview is more than just an exciting mythological adventure, it is part of a radical approach to “decolonizing” the American mind.

As an educator and community organizer I use these narratives to combat the pervasive ideologies of racism, patriarchy, and American exceptionalism. I will share how I read and teach Mesoamerican femininity as a piece of a greater conversation of “Corn Consciousness,” a social philosophy I have adapted using and honoring poorly understood Indigenous epistemologies. I use these teachings in community and organizations as a guide to consciously stepping out of a hyper-masculinized mentality and into a feral feminine alignment to explore, wade through, and emerge reoriented to our collective spaces.

This presentation is part of a special panel on Confronting Colonialism and White Supremacy in Myth, sponsored by the Pacifica Graduate Institute Alumni Association.

About Rosalie

Rosalie Nell Bouck has degrees in Mythological Studies, Philosophy, and Political Science and over a decade of experience as a community organizer, nonprofit project developer, and educator among under-served populations. She has spent time living in Mexico and in Guatemala among the k’iche Maya. Her current work is as a narrative consultant for decolonizing projects and draws from her academic education, lifelong activism, and unique cultural perspectives.

To hear Rosalie’s presentation and many others, join us at the Mythologium!

The Mythologium is a conference and retreat for mythologists and friends of myth, held July 30 – Aug 1 via Zoom. Register here!

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Dr. Karin Zirk

Karin’s talk is called “Starting a Conversation on Decolonizing Mythology”

Oftentimes as mythologists, a narrative or an image enchants us and we forget that mythic artifacts do not exist in isolation but are embedded in human culture with all the problematics that entails. This discussion starter aims to reveal issues, problems, and potential methods for decolonizing our field. As a field of inquiry, Mythology comes into existence during the cultural juxtapositions created by colonialism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The colonized became objects of study for Europeans, who documented the cultural habits, sacred beliefs, arts, and other cultural artifacts of non-European cultures even as the Europeans strove to Westernize and destroy these cultures. In many instances, the mythic artifacts mythologists explore come from the ongoing exploration of native people, people from non-Western backgrounds, and other marginalized cultures. I intend to provide a brief background on the theoretical work by Faye V. Harrison on decolonizing anthropology, David Miller on mythoclasm, and Joel P. Christensen on decolonizing a myth class for what I hope will be a brainstorming session using the Kumeyaay Birds Songs as our mythic artifact and addressing the problematics inherent in my own mythic exploration of this tradition.

About Karin

Karin Zirk, Ph.D. is a mythologist, activist, and writer, whose first novel, Falling From The Moon, was released in early 2020. She earned her doctorate in Mythological Studies with an Emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute where her dissertation focused on using mythic artifacts and journal writing to enhance well-being in family caregivers. She facilitates in-person and online workshops using mythic artifacts and creative expression to explore both individual and cultural challenges facing the world. Her collection of poetry, Notes from the Road, chronicled her years traveling the USA in a Volkswagen camper van. She is a longtime advocate for a Southern California creek and attends peace and healing gatherings. When not engaged in her passions, she works in Information Technology.