To attend in-person, please register at this link instead.

Land & Liberation: Indigenous Sovereignty, Social Ecology, and Returning to Right Relationship

This year's social ecology summer intensive course is being hosted in partnership with Native Roots Network and the Peoples' Network for Land and Liberation. From June 5 to 11, we will gather at Native Roots Network's Traditional Ecological Knowledge land lab Wenem To•s in Shasta County, just outside Redding, California. While this gathering is primarily designed around in-person participation, we will also be enabling hybrid attendance for most of the sessions for those unable to join us at Wenem To•s. Together, we will dive headfirst into the ideas and practices of social ecology: grassroots organizing, ecological philosophy, direct democracy, and revolutionary social transformation.

This year's theme is Land and Liberation: Indigenous Sovereignty, Social Ecology, and Returning to Right Relationship. We are drawn to the many roles of land in the process of social transformation. It is both a means for cultivating bases of power to resist the present system and a source of responsibility for cultivating new relationships to the more-than-human world. How we must relate to the land, ecologically and politically, draws indigenous struggle and social ecology together.

For Native Roots Network, this requires what they name “(K)new” practices and relations: at the same time an imaginative step into our unknown future and a return to ancestral lifeways. This notion shapes our thinking about entering right relationship with nature, about transforming our culture and society, about revolutionary political struggle—looking to our history as we create our future. The very language of “revolution” itself contains this same sensibility: the word means the overthrow of existing social structures in a great forward leap, and a return, in the astronomical sense of a planet completing its revolution around the sun and rearriving at an earlier position. Through the land practices we will focus upon in this week, we in this same sense seek to revolutionize our relationships to the land—and one another.

Over the course of this program, we will explore Indigenous initiatives to regenerate their ancestral lands and waterways, “Acornomics” as a solidarity economy model, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, dual power, questions of revolutionary organization, and much more. Throughout this week of collective study and collective discussion, we will be asking ourselves and one another: What is the relationship between land and liberation? How do we build a new society while the world is burning?

Registration fee is on a sliding scale—standard registration is what we estimate will be our average per-person cost for putting on this event. Anything you can contribute beyond that will help us cover for those who need a discounted registration. Program schedule updates will be listed here as they are finalized. When registering, please make sure the leave the box ticked that reads "Allow the Institute for Social Ecology to contact me." This is necessary for you to receive updates about how to participate in the livestreams. Invite your friends and comrades, and we hope you can join us, even from afar!

Program details below in draft form, subject to ongoing change. We are thrilled to have you join us! Reach out to social-ecology@mail.mayfirst.org with any questions.

~ The Institute for Social Ecology, Native Roots Network, and the Peoples' Network for Land and Liberation

Program Schedule for Virtual Participation

All times listed in Pacific time.

Friday, June 5

4pm-6pm: Introduction to Social Ecology, with the Institute for Social Ecology

Saturday, June 6

10am-12pm: Acornomics, with Native Roots Network

1:30-3:30pm: Zapatismo and Pluriversal Ontology, with Linda Quiquivix

4pm-6pm: Philosophy of Social Ecology, with the Institute for Social Ecology

Sunday, June 7

10am-12pm: Dual Power and the State, with the Institute for Social Ecology

1:30-3:30pm: Peoples' Network for Land and Liberation - The Build and Fight Program, with David Cobb

4pm-6pm: Historic Truths, Present Realities, and Restorative-Relational Healing Work in Indian Country, with Radley Davis and Kenwani’cahee Kravitz

Monday, June 8

10am-12:30pm: From Elwha to Klamath: The Work Continues, with Vanessa Castle

1:30-3:30pm: Decolonizing Kurdistan, with Deniz Demir

4pm-6pm: Somos la Milpa: Liberating the Future through Ancestral Technology, with Aquilli Metzli Cooperative

Tuesday, June 9

10am-12:30pm: Fire Ecology of the West

4pm-6pm: Justice Processes, Against and Beyond the State, with Marina Sitrin and Sandra Rodriguez

Wednesday, June 10

1:30-3:30pm: Communalism as a New Paradigm, with the Institute for Social Ecology

4pm-6pm: Traditional Ecological Knowledge, with Feather Wolfing

(VIRTUAL) Land and Liberation: Indigenous Sovereignty, Social Ecology, and Returning to Right Relationship

2026 Social Ecology Summer Intensive