(Re)creating River Practices: A Liberation Sutra

What can we learn from a river—a goddess?

Hello everyone, I am giving a keynote at the Goddess-Makers in an Age of Autocrats conference this weekend (Aug 29-31). You can join in person at Santa Barbara, or via live streaming, if this is of interest.

(Re)creating River Practices: A Liberation Sutra

What can we learn from a river—a goddess—about keeping our knowing of inner/outer transformations alive in the face of colonial coercion, patriarchy, capitalism and techno-political authoritarianism? For almost fifty years, the banks, jungles, and valleys of the Narmada were the site of a series of peoples’ movements resisting the damming of their river, ecological fragmentation, their own displacement, and the erasure of their sacred and cultural links to the land. Although the natural flow of the water is now impeded, is it possible that the river/goddess can still teach us—that she still houses living knowledges—that she is willing, still, to share her stories and willfulness?

This keynote, drawing on Narmada’s mythologies and geo-ecology as well as indigenous oral histories of the movements—will enact an arts-based approach to re-surface and theorize the spirit patterns of radical relationality, resilience, and restoration of balance.