Bring the Seeds of Resistance Tour to your Town!

This summer (early June to late August), Knowing the Land is Resistance (KLR) Collective will be doing some traveling, to explore wild spaces throughout the Southern Ontario region and to connect with the people who love them. Over the past couple of years we’ve been giving workshops and working to deepen our knowledge of the land where we live. Now we want to take these experiences on the road! We are currently looking for people interested in hosting us in their towns and helping to organize workshops there.

What is KLR?

KLR’s framework is rooted in understanding how the land came to be the way it is, and how it continues to change. Rather than see wild spaces as static pictures, we try and understand them as stories that continue to move ahead, stories of which we are active parts. Learning to read this story is a key step in allying with the earth. Once we know how land has changed, and how it continues to change, we can more clearly see for ourselves what forces contribute to its health and which are harmful.

What are these workshops?

The workshops we offer are three hours long and have two parts. The first is one hour indoors, where together we set our intentions and share skills and perspectives, with a strong emphasis on understanding the ongoing impacts of colonialism on both ourselves and the land.

In the second part, we get out to play in the forest! We’ll play games to practice observing, ask questions based on what we notice, and see what more those questions lead us to observe. With inquisitive minds and keen senses, we will work together to build up our forest literacy and knowledge of ecosystems, and learn to read the signs of historical processes on the land around us.

Everyone’s knowledge and experiences in this are valuable — there’s no such thing as experts, and those who claim to be forest experts are mostly just silly.

The workshop is free, though we will accept donations towards transportation costs.
What’s needed from hosts?

The main thing we need from our hosts is to pick a good wild space for us to go explore! A wild space is any space where various plants, creatures, and natural forces are free to live and develop, their many voices together creating new networks of relationships. These spaces can be rich forestconservation areas, rewilding vacant lots, scrublands along traintracks, or woodlots in the country – any space that inspires and energizes you, and to which you already have a connection.
We also ask for our hosts to help promote the event, find an indoor or sheltered space near the wild space that we can use for the first part of the workshop, and arrange for participants’ transportation to the site if need be.

How to get involved

If you are interested in bringing us to your community, drop us a line by June 21st. If you want more information about who we are and what we do, visit https://knowingtheland.wordpress.com/ to check out our monthly series of articles, or write to us at knowingtheland@gmail.com.We’re looking forward to hearing from you.
Til the rivers run clean,

-KLR Collective

Skunk Cabbage and sunshine in the Spencer Gorge