Each year, on March 30th, the Palestinian people observe Land Day, marking the events of 1976 when Palestinians in Israel staged a general strike and orchestrated large-scale demonstrations to denounce Israel's seizure of their lands. Tragically, the day culminated in the deaths of six Palestinians at the hands of Israeli police forces. In the continuous genocidal seizure of land, bodies, hearts, and dreams. How do we envision Healing through land-based practices? How do we re-establish our connection to the land and engage in the revival of our traditional wellness methods, supported by resources to relearn and reclaim them?
Hosted by Palestinian Feminist Collective.
Layla K. Feghali is an ethnobotanist, cultural worker, and author who lives between her ancestral village in Lebanon, and California, where she was born and raised. Feghali’s work is about restoring relationships to earth-based ancestral wisdom as an avenue towards eco-cultural stewardship, collective healing, and liberation. Feghali hosts a line of plantcestral medicine, community education, mutual aid efforts, and other culturally-rooted offerings, with an emphasis on land-based lifeways from the Crossroads (Southwest Asia + North Africa) and its diasporas. Her recent book, The Land in Our Bones, documents cultural herbal and healing knowledge from Syria to the Sinai, while interrogating colonialism and its lingering wounds on the culture of our displaced world.
Dr. Mohamed Abdou is a North African-Egyptian Muslim anarchist interdisciplinary activist-scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race, and Islamic studies, as well as gender, sexuality, abolition, and decolonization with extensive fieldwork experience in the Middle East-North Africa, Asia, and Turtle Island. This upcoming year, he will be the Arcapita Visiting Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. He is a former Assistant Professor of Sociology at the American University of Cairo and recently completed his postdoctoral fellowship at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies’ Inequalities, Identities, and Justice research team at Cornell University; he continues to be listed as an international affiliate scholar with Einaudi.
Indigenous Palestinian Decolonial Healing Guide Team: We have written this workbook as co-authors including Devin Atallah, Caesar Hakim, Hana Masud, Yousef AlAjarma, Aya Darwish, Abeer Musleh, Rayyan Alfatafta, and Nihaya Abu-Rayyan. Together, we have succeeded in developing this fully bilingual workbook (English and Arabic), which we have called, “CURCUM’s Trees: A Decolonial Healing Guide for Palestinian Community Health Workers” and can be downloaded now here: https://mayflybooks.org/curcums-trees/ and is also on twitter : https://twitter.com/MayflyBooks
Nihaya Aburayyan is freelance psychotherapist in Palestine. Narrative therapy practitioner & supervisor, co-researcher and indigenous healer and trainer on decolonial liberational and healing justice praxis.
Devin Atallah PhD is an assistant professor with the Psychology Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Atallah aims to engage decolonizing, narrative, and community-based participatory approaches to critical inquiry, primarily within his long-term partnerships with communities in Palestine, communities of color in Boston, and Mapuche communities in Chile.