A 6-week Learning Journey with Lyla June

Join our first ever course led by Lyla June exploring how to connect with Indigenous Knowledge. Become aware of the context of ongoing colonization to constructively interface and form healthy alliances with Indigenous Peoples. Explore identifying and unlearning certain extractivist and colonial paradigms we may have subconsciously adopted over time.

Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) are encoded with unique principles, values, goals, strategies, arts, sciences, and ways of knowing that can support the world today. But before we receive this knowledge it is important to learn how to honor the communities from which they come and do so respectfully and responsibly.


 Starts February, 17th, 2025 - Registrations until Feb, 24th 

Course details

This course, led by Dr. Lyla June Johnston of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne), and European lineages, guides us to deeply integrate proper value systems of respect, reverence, reciprocity, responsibility, humility, and generosity into our learning process. It is designed to help us unlearn conscious and unconscious paradigms of hierarchy, supremacism, monoculturalism, profit maximization, reputation building, domination, and fear, which can lead us to accidentally reproduce dysfunctional intercultural dynamics.

With this new emotional infrastructure in place, we will be more ready to learn Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge, and other forms of Indigenous knowledge, in a way that does not accidentally perpetuate colonial and extractivist legacies. By learning how to give and be in service to these knowledge systems, we cannot only learn from them abundantly, but help them heal the world as is so desperately needed in this time. In the process, each of us will begin to reconnect with our own Indigenous roots, whoever we are, even if they are buried deep under millennia of erasure and suppression. Through this process, we can all transform ourselves into effective agents of social and ecological healing.


Course Logistics

  • 6 weeks-long course;
  • Weekly 90 minutes live session with Lyla June - time and day here - recorded for those unable to join live;
  • Weekly fresh material to written by Lyla June;
  • Forum interaction with peers to support learning journey


 

Journey Outline

  1. Introduction, historial context and Understanding our positionality in the global citizenry;
  2. Unlearning: colonial paradigms and fear based societies;
  3. Learning: restoring our universal identity, service learning and matrilineality;
  4. Solidarity: Learning is a lifelong relationship;

  5. Strategies and Success Stories;

  6. Indigenous Knowledge Systems Society & Ecology.

Course Creator

Dr. Lyla June Johnston (aka Lyla June) is an Indigenous musician, author, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages. Her multi-genre presentation style has engaged audiences across the globe towards personal, collective, and ecological healing.

Lyla blends her study of Human Ecology at Stanford, graduate work in Indigenous Pedagogy, and the traditional worldview she grew up with to inform her music, perspectives and solutions. Her doctoral research focused on the ways in which pre-colonial Indigenous Nations shaped large regions of Turtle Island (aka the Americas) to produce abundant food systems for humans and non-humans.

Lyla June Main.Feather

 

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