Celebrating Restorative Relations

By Itzel Flores Castillo Wang, LiKEN Disaster Resilience Program Assistant

“We all bury our dead together, we all raise our children together”

- MariaElena Lopez, Founding Director of the SPACE

This small, but very big sentence was only part of the many learnings that MariaElena Lopez, one of many amazing panel speakers, shared during Celebrating Restorative Relations: Connections between climate resilience, Indigenous rights, and land and water rematriation. This seemingly small sentence reminds us of why connection and relationships matter immensely - because together, especially in times like today, we all can come together to uplift and support one another. Perhaps more importantly, as we come together we can heal and “when we heal and the land heals, it enriches everything for everyone.”

With this sentiment in mind, throughout Celebrating Restorative Relations intersectionality across movements and honoring relationships, people, places, and more were uplifted and echoed by everyone. The event, which happened on March 6th in the traditional homelands of the Chumash people, known as UC Santa Barbara and Santa Barbara in California, included a morning workshop and evening community-building gathering, and was co-hosted by LiKEN in collaboration with the CREW Center for Restorative Environmental Work, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Climate Justice Working Group, the UCSB American Indian & Indigenous Collective, and the SPACE Su’nan Protection, Art & Cultural Education. Featured panelists included Indigenous and allied movement builders, practitioners, and organizers (see flyer for more details on each of these amazing change-makers) who highlighted the importance of collective actions of reviving relationships of care and connectedness between peoples, lands, waters, and multispecies kin.

Both gatherings centered on critical conversations needed to understand and amplify connections between Land Back movements and politics, processes of reciprocity, and resilient ecosystems – as well as the importance of decommissioning and dam removal within energy transitions, among other responses to global climate change. Overall, both events served as an opportunity to celebrate ongoing acts of resistance and restoration, with one of the other goals in holding both gatherings in communities close to one another to be rooted in awareness of how place and community interact in different contexts. Special thank you and gratitude to Tristan Partridge and Javiera Barandiaran for coordinating the morning workshop at UCSB, and MariaElena Lopez for opening up the SPACE to welcome us for the evening community gathering.

Morning workshop on the UC Santa Barbara campus. Event organizers and panelists from left to right: Tristan Partridge, Javiera Barandiaran, Teresa Romero, Margaret McMurtrey, MariaElena Lopez, Itzel Flores Castillo Wang, Sybil Diver, Julie Maldonado, and Sarah Barger.

**Facilitator and panelist speakers. From left to right: Julie Maldonado, Teresa Romero, Sybil Diver, MariaElena Lopez, Margaret MCMurtrey, and Sarah Barger.**

The morning workshop, held on the UC Santa Barbara campus to connect with students and the broader campus community, helped to set the tone for the day with a special focus on sharing what people can do to support restorative environmental and social justice movements while celebrating relationships, kindness, empathy, processes of reciprocity and more. Panelists shared both personal and professional experiences on how we can be part of these crucial conversations, with all uplifting the value of honoring place-based learning, traditional ecological knowledges and practices, and sacred connections to land, water, and all our relatives. They spoke of the importance of appreciating the unique experiences, traits, and knowledges that each person and place have to offer, and knowing and understanding their traditions, language, and more - as this is crucial to being able to build relationships with intentionality and care for how learnings are shared with one another to keep the work moving forward. This morning - which saw the room filled over capacity, which only highlighted how much students and people are ready to join, build, and continue these relationships - ended with calls to action from the panelists which included:

Being a good guest on lands you are not from and making time to learn more about the communities you are a part of
Uplifting youth voices and teaching them from early on about Indigenous history and histories of their communities
Always centering the community and placing them first, asking what you can do for the community, as opposed to proposing what you can do for them
Understanding that relationships and trust take time to build, that patience and empathy for one another are key factors and
To show up and continue showing up, especially as allies, because oftentimes this work takes years and continuous support is needed.

Community gathering at the SPACE. Event organizers and panelists from left to right: Sybil Diver, Teresa Romero, Itzel Flores Castillo Wang, Sarah Barger, Tristan Partridge, Javiera Barandiaran, Julie Maldonado, Margaret McMurtrey, and MariaElena Lopez.

**Inside the SPACE, with panelists and community members.**

As the evening approached a smaller group of people gathered in community at the SPACE in a more intimate setting, allowing the opportunity to take a deeper, perhaps even more vulnerable dive into the morning conversations. MariaElena and her family opened this gathering with a beautiful song and prayer to help in guiding and protecting the conversations that were about to be shared. Panelists and guests discussed the crucial importance of peacekeeping work, treating everyone with respect, of knowing the why and how actions (such as cultural fires) are done, the understanding that no one’s knowledge is above others, and what it means to be able to access and reconnect to the land. In talking about peacekeeping work, panelists spoke to how this work can be hard and difficult to navigate because there is much hurt, trauma and sadness that needs to be talked about and addressed; but at the same time, what was highly uplifted was the need to come together, invite everyone into these conversations, and create safe spaces where people can be vulnerable with each other and heal in order to truly be able to recognize and support one another. In connection to this, others spoke to the challenges in working within colonial systems of land ownership but within that also looking for the positive in learning how to navigate them and helping to undo harm through this. And not only undo harm through vulnerability and healing, but also through reparations - both individually and collectively.

“If we start with love, end with love - we will figure out the rest of the mess in between.”

-Julie Maldonado, LiKEN Associate Director

The energy felt by the group of people gathered in these convenings was palpable. Especially in light of the world we are currently experiencing, the need to be in community could be felt. But more than anything, the feeling of being in community with people who share the same vision and values was strong and the energy emanating from the panelists, participants, and more, for wanting to continue strengthening and building connections with one another, continued to grow stronger as the day carried on. Celebrating Strong Relations was not just a one-time event; it is a continuous must-do as we carry on with fighting for land back and regaining access to sacred spaces, for water, for past and future generations, and so much more. The journey towards liberation for all may not be easy, but if we do it together, we can rise through it together. Thank you to all the wonderful panelists for your time and shared wisdom, and to all those who attended for making time to join us in these crucial moments. We cannot wait to continue building on these connections and relationships into the future.