Alder Commons

🌱Welcome to Nettle Ways! 🌱

This course offers a welcoming space to explore European ancestral experiences and develop meaningful, place-based relationships.
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Together, we’ll focus on reconnecting with European ancestries so as to remember and revive those European lifeways that support nurturing relations with human communities, more-than-human communities, and with the living Earth. We’ll also ground this exploration in the present, connecting it to the places and times we live in now.
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A key part of this journey will be working with stinging nettle—as medicine, food, and fiber—to embody these relationships. Stinging nettle will serve as both an example of how place-based connections can form and as a bridge between our local ecosystems in the lower Columbia region and those in Europe where stinging nettle is also present and culturally important.
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Central to this work is unsettling ways of being based in systems of domination and supremacy tied to race and colonization, while fostering practices rooted in justice, solidarity, and liberation.
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Who is this course for?
This course is designed to be most relevant for people with European ancestry. However, identity is complex, and the relevance of the course may or may not overlap with being racialized as white, passing as white, or identifying as a white settler. Additionally, anyone who feels drawn to the course is welcome to join. The facilitator will connect with participants ahead of time to receive feedback about how everyone can be supported.
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🌱Learn more & Register here: https://app.aldercommons.org/program/nettle

What can you expect to learn in our upcoming ✨The Truth: Immigration and US Policy in Latin America✨ workshop?

✨(Weeks 1-5, Weeks 6-10 coming soon!)✨
Week 1 - Intro
What is the modern political discourse like around immigration and how did it get here?
What is an immigrant? What is a border? What is citizenship? What does it mean to be “illegal”?
Timeline of US immigration law - from the Chinese Exclusion Act to ICE raids and sanctuary cities today
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Week 2 - Mexico Part 1
Spanish colonization vs British colonization
Miscegenation, Independence, Slavery
Mexican/American War and US Civil War, Largely indigenous people labeled “immigrants”
Manifest Destiny, Porfiriato, Revolution
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Week 3 - Mexico Part 2
Dawes Act
PRI
WWII and Bracero Program
1965 - Mexican immigration quotas put in place, effectively making millions of people illegal, now we can say that it isn’t race, it’s "illegality"
Operation Gatekeeper, EZLN, The growth of drug cartels m US Drug War
Modern US/Mexico politics
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Week 4 - Central America - Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras
Walker, Reagan and Iran/Contra, Sandinistas
"Civil war" vs politicide/genocide
Coups and attempted ones
United Fruit Co.
Death squads
Continued Indigenous genocide
Influence on Castro and Che and Cuba
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Week 5 - Caribbean - Haiti, DR, PR, Guam, Cub
Haiti independence and continued punishment by global community
DR - Haitian relations (compare to US-Mexico relations)
Anti-Black racism in immigration policy, Race in Latin America
US colonies/protectorates, PR and Guam citizenship, issues
Cuban Revolution and blockades, special immigration status, Miami, Elian Gonzalez
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Want to learn more? Join us starting next week! Link in bio!