<div style="text-align: left; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em;"><p>After almost 10 years of this complicity, I am stopping now. The Feldenkrais Method is rife with Zionism, from its birth in Palestine, when Moshe (1) built a “defense” training taught to settlers, (2) partook in the creation of “defence” military weapons used in the 1948 Nakba (HEMED), to (3) his close ties with the Zionist government through the years of massacres of Palestian lands and people, (4) the institutional continuation of his Zionist legacy un-questioned.</p><ul><li><p>for more information on this, refer to my other blog.</p></li></ul></div><div style="text-align: left; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em;"><p>My complicity has been simple; I just continue to do this work, talk about it, market it, without speaking to its history, because I have been too scared not to make a living.</p></div><div style="text-align: left; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em;"><p>I’ve decided to no longer use the name. I will call my work Somatic Movement, and I am basing it more on my own exploration of my body than on his body of work.</p></div><div style="text-align: left; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em;"><p>It is important to know that I have not always been the best at anti-racism. I have been called out. I have lost friends because of the learned fragility and fear of being accountable that comes with being an uninformed white body in this colonized world.</p></div><div style="text-align: left; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em;"><p>I say this to be clear to my audience that I will never be perfect. My intention is to act towards liberation, but this does not mean that I won’t make mistakes. When I notice that I am no longer centring liberation, I take a step back and try to refocus my energy and intention.</p></div><div style="text-align: left; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em;"><p>My intention is also to hold white people in accountablity and beloning. Given that it is my intention, I must also hold myself in accountability and belonging too.</p></div><div style="text-align: left; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em;"><p>I am connected to Southern Italy and, potentially, ancestrally to Spain. My grandparents resettled twice, once from their small villages to cities, and then to Turtle Island, after fascism and capitalism destroyed the capacity for a comfortable life.</p></div><div style="text-align: left; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em;"><p>I consider this to be one of the latest forms of complicity in the colonial project.</p></div><div style="text-align: left; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em;"><p>It was easier for my family to move to a completely unknown country than to solve the problems of fascism and colonialism in Europe through direct action. I do, however, hold my people in belonging - as this choice was built on decades of suffering and complicity in Colonial Catholicism. My southern ancestors were detached from our elders, our rituals and our spirit.</p></div><div style="text-align: left; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em;"><p>Before the colonial project appropriated Catholicism and Pagan spirituality, my people were fierce, gender was free, bodies were honoured, sexuality was adored, and we were held with love and belonging through our errors. We were guided by our elders, and we honoured our land.</p><img src="https://ezycourse.b-cdn.net/2813/cmrmj2kpccv3u5qqp4vo438wj.jpeg" alt="image" style="height: auto; cursor: pointer;"></div><p>*this is a photo of women dancing the Tarantella in Napoli (southern italy).</p><div style="text-align: left; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em;"><p>Ultimately, we were betrayed by those who wanted power. These people were our own people, who bowed down to the Colonial Catholic church. They enacted laws against our elders and healers. They gave power to our husbands and brothers who betrayed us with this privilege. They stole and privatized our land, and punished those who broke down the fences. They cut down our trees and blocked our right to sacred ritual. They killed our elders, our healers; women and gender diverse people.</p></div><div style="text-align: left; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em;"><p>When they realized their project was no longer sustainable on our lands, they invaded others. Dressed as <span><em>“men of knowledge”</em></span> and <span><em>“men of god,”</em></span> these colonizers enacted the very same laws on indigenous peoples - to rape the land and people, all for profit.</p></div><div style="text-align: left; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em;"><p>Each time their project seemed no longer sustainable, they moved onto another land, enacting the same laws, over and over, until this very moment. Today, this de-attachment from our bodies, our lands and our people has become an attachment to the colonial project, out of need to feel something, and out of fear of being burned alive in the colonizer’s fire.</p></div><div style="text-align: left; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em;"><p>White-bodied Italian Settlers have been complicit in the apartheid and genocidal system created by the colonial system on Turtle Island. We have not collectively denounced these systems, yet we profit from a perspective of “<span><em>spicy white</em></span>,” which allows us to covertly slide away from accountability in upholding this system. We befriend immigrant communities so long as they do not disrupt coloniality or ask us to denounce colonialism.</p></div><div style="text-align: left; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em;"><p>We must hold our community accountable by remembering our family members who fought against fascism decades ago, and our ancestors who refused to obey the colonizers centuries ago.</p></div><div style="text-align: left; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em;"><p>Collectively, we have the responsibility and the power to stop this centuries-long project.</p></div>

My people and my own complicity in colonial and genocidal systems.

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My people and my own complicity in colonial and genocidal systems.

My people and my own complicity in colonial and genocidal systems.

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