"To all of our young Indigenous girls/femmes out there: You can be anything and conquer anything in this world because you carry the strength of your grandmother's before you."

- Sara Twiss, IWR Lead Coordinator

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic impacted our regularly scheduled projects by limiting our ability to conduct in-person sessions with our participants. Our IWR team effectively made transitions into virtual communications and practices for Indigenous womxn/girls to continue learning and sharing based on major themes provided in the originally planned workshop series.

This page will continue to be an outlet for inspiring Indigenous womxn/girls across the continent by sharing traditional knowledge, stories, and participatory practices through an emergence of a new technological form of Indigenous social empowerment.

Land and Body Workshop

On November 12th, 2020, Indigenous Women Rize held their first virtual workshop session entitled 'Our Bodies Connection to the Land: Building A Pathway for Ourselves.' Through practicing wellness and healing activities, over 30 participants from across North America centered their body relations to their traditional lands, and further built an understanding of how Indigenous women play a vital role in the protection and reclamation of their territories. This session was approximately 2 hours long, and filled with breathing exercises, critical discussions, body mapping exercises, short videos and sharing artwork with each other. A video recording is provided below, with full, informed, and prior consent of all participants and facilitators, for further dissemination and sharing practices among our partners, supporters, and allies.

Body Mapping Activity

For this activity, participants were asked to sketch a body outline on a piece of paper. They took 4-5 minutes to either write, doodle, or sketch a response for 5 prompts, then collectively share their maps with the group. Individuals who offered to share their body maps are in the gallery below and the prompts are listed here:

Head - What intention would you like to set for yourself as part of community care?

Heart - What emotions come forward for you at this moment?

Core - What core values do you hold and who gifted it to you?

Hips - What are you releasing back to our Earth Mother?

Feet - What steps can you take for your wellness and/or your homelands?

HEAD - "I want to set good and positive intentions. I want to learn about others while also respecting them and creating a safe space."

HEART- "Powerful, connected, worthy, aware, creative, less anxious, and hopeful."

CORE - "A core value my mom taught me is to respect and care for the Earth because she birthed and cares for us."

HIPS - "Ask Mother (Earth) to take pain away, to align healing, and set me on a good path."

FEET - "Self-awareness, self-care, doing the meticulous things. I write the words down to help heal from my bullies of the past. I draw when I'm too idle."

FEET - "The steps I will take for my wellness is (to) take care of myself first and ground myself often."