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Jeanne Corrigal and Susan Gingell will facilitate this eight-part series that will explore whiteness, racism and antiracism through guided conversations informed by mindfulness.
Mindfulness will be taught and practiced at each gathering, encouraging a gentle but intentional focus on the present moment with steadiness in observing our thoughts and feelings. Mindfulness can thus help us deal with difficult emotions and situations. Because racism is such an emotionally charged topic, framing the unwinding of whiteness within mindfulness practice invites a kind, non-shaming approach to conversations while engaged in an honest pursuit of difficult truths about race and racism.
Mindfully Unwinding Whiteness is intended for “white”/Euro-Canadian participants because, as Ajay Parasram and Alex Khasnabish explain in Frequently Asked White Questions, it would be “unfair to non[-]white participants in public or educational settings to have to offer both training and emotional support to the white people around them” but also “unfair to expect white people to understand the politics of race when the very operation of racial politics in Canada has encouraged them to not think or talk about race lest they appear to be racist.”
In Mindfully Unwinding Whiteness’s guided conversations, we will pay particular attention to the invention and sustaining of whiteness, and anti-Indigenous racism, but will also more briefly consider racism faced by others.
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Jeanne Corrigal is Métis from the Prince Albert area. She has worked as a public educator in reconciliation for 40 years through film, storytelling and teaching. She originated and has twice taught an Unwinding Whiteness course. She is a certified teacher in Insight Meditation and Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and has taught mindfulness for 15 years. One of her first teachers in kind, loving presence was Cree Elder Jim Settee.
Susan Gingell is a Euro-Canadian immigrant to Turtle Island grateful to live on Treaty 6 territory and the homeland of the Métis/Metis. At the University of Saskatchewan, she taught decolonizing and transnational literatures in English and Women’s & Gender Studies. A 10-year member of Iskwewuk E-wichiwitochik/Women Walking Together, she helped resource the first Unwinding Whiteness course; completed the Saskatoon Antiracism Network’s trauma-infused antiracism training; and participates in the peer-led Post-Unwinding Whiteness Project.
AGE GROUP: | Adults |
EVENT TYPE: | Speakers & Special Events | Reconciliation | Indigenous |
The Round Prairie Library opened in 2017 and was named in honour of the La Prairie Round (or Round Prairie) Métis, who were a community of buffalo hunters that established a wintering site near Dakota Whitecap in the late 1800s. In the 1920s and 1930s many in the community were forced to migrate to Saskatoon in search of work, and by the 1940s they had established a permanent and close-knit community near the current site of the library. This library includes an Innovation Lab and Video Game Room.
