Land as Pleasure Workshop Series

The Land as Pleasure Workshops are a series of conversations, interviews, and interactive workshops with people whose work broadly relates to the question:

How can we reorient our relationship with the earth towards one of pleasure?

The workshops are connected to the concept of land trauma, as defined by Mary Ann Thomas (@postcardsfrommat) as the multifaceted ways in which humans are severed from the land, including, but not limited to: indigenous genocide, migration, traumas humans inflict on the land, and natural disasters. Through the Intro to Land Trauma Course, MAT’s work asks participants to investigate their relationship to the land, feel deeply, and offer the land care, time, and attention, so they might co-create a reciprocal loving relationship.

The Land as Pleasure Workshop Series builds on these concepts by offering space for interviewees to share their experiences building relationship to land—whether that’s ancestral land, the land they live on now, or a spiritual homeland they do not have physical access to. By hearing the tangible ways in which people are healing, participants will leave the workshop with tangible ways they, too, can heal their relationship with the various lands they are in contact with.

Past workshops:

Jesi Harris

The series kicked off with Jesi Harris, in a conversation that brought together the science of WHY going outside is so transformational, with generative questions to apply this science to your life.

More on Jesi:

Jesi Harris is a Master of Urban Planning student at USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy. She hails from North Carolina where she graduated from UNC - Chapel Hill with a BA in Psychology and a minor in English. After graduating from UNC in 2010, Jesi worked as a Direct Support Professional at nonprofit Residential Services Inc. assisting adults who had intellectual and developmental disabilities where she worked to help her residents live with independence and dignity. She began to see that in order to truly deinstitutionalize its people, cities must be intentionally shaped into accessible places for everyone.

She moved to Los Angeles in 2013 and began working at the Youth Center on Highland, the LA LGBT Center’s shelter and drop-in space for homeless youth in Hollywood. In her position as Health Education Specialist, implementing a grant from the AIDS Coordinator’s Office to intervene in the relationship between substance abuse and HIV infection among at-risk youth of color, she integrated outdoor play through a weekly group called Recess, giving transitional aged youth a chance to learn and grow through play. She left the LGBT Center to be the Organizing Director of the LA County Bicycle Coalition and, in 2019, served as the Growth Manager at People for Mobility Justice. She has since joined the research team at USC’s Equity Research Institute as a Graduate Researcher. After her upcoming graduation in May 2021, she hopes to build a career in affordable, sustainable development.

(image description: Black babe smiling in floral button-down and black t-shirt against a wall of green vines.)

haydée "hr" souffrant

In the second workshop of the series, haydée "hr" souffrant shared some of her experience connecting to ancestral homeland through spirituality and listening to the spiritual homeland that lives in the body. She offered ways to pivot towards "learning to listen" to inner knowings, especially when connecting to nature/land/spiritual work and journeys.

More on haydée:

haydée "hr" souffrant is a Chicago-based Haitian American writer and artist-healer. Her performance and creative work weaves together cultural memory, mysticism and healing. souffrant’s work via arts programming combines restorative justice and creative arts workshops to connect folks together to create spaces of empathy and social justice.

(image descriptions: photo below is color; Black person laughs.)

Celia Denton:

In the third workshop of the series, Celia Denton shared her experiences interacting with food as indigenous & cultural practice. They guided participants through exercises designed to uncover what memories are linked to foods and how that can connect us to the land and to our ancestral practices.

More on Celia:

Celia (she/they) is a 2S Tsimshian person with a strong passion for culture, community, language, food, nature, and how those things inherently tie together. Celia currently lives in Juneau, AK working as a community coordinator for a literacy program targeting Alaska Native children age 0-5 throughout Southeast Alaska.

Her childhood was spent on the reservation of Metlakatla and in Ketchikan, Alaska. She spent most of her adult life in Anchorage working in the food industry in various capacities (front of house, back of house, retail, etc.) During that time she also achieved a bachelor's in Anthropology with a focus on culture and linguistics at the University of Alaska Anchorage. For the past several years, she has been participating in various Sm'algyax learning groups. Through professional, community, and academic work, Celia tries to flourish through identity. Most recently, this identity work has been focused on Indigenous foods and the role of Indigenous people through food sovereignty. Much have this work has been personal, but she has also made some connection through work with a Minneapolis based nonprofit called NATIFS (North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems.) Her goal is to be involved with something similar for Alaska.

(image descriptions: a brown person, smiling and baking)

Sarah Jane

In the fourth workshop of the series, Sarah Jane shared her process of ancestral tracings. Becoming her family’s genealogist was never the plan, but Sarah was captivated by this mode of research and enthusiastically shared what she’s learned about her heritage, how to use tools like ancestry databases and genetic testing, and why this inquiry has been pleasurable despite its frustrations and contradictions.

More on Sarah:

Sarah Jane is an anti-capitalist academic and a white queer woman in a process of discovering her Ashkenazi Jewish roots. As a sociologist, she is dedicated to continually unveiling the constructed nature of social life – and in doing so, remembering that alternatives are present and possible. For her dissertation research, she is studying state management and redistribution of natural resource wealth in Alaska. She is also actively involved in organizing her graduate student colleagues to unionize, and in fighting for socialist policies and candidates in her home of Brooklyn, NY and beyond.

(image description: a white woman grinning on a cold, windy beach in front of a colony of seabirds.)

Nikita

In the fifth workshop of the series, Nikita invited us into the emotional process required to not just give, but also receive, care as a pleasure practice. This workshop offered insight to anyone with questions like, “I am new to a city, how do I build friendships as an adult?”, “How do I find my queer chosen family?”, "I know about care webs, but I don't know how to create my own”, “My needs are ever evolving as I learn to survive chronic illness. How do I ask for more help from those around me? ”, “I feel lonely and isolated sometimes, how do I build community?” & “Why does shame or guilt come up when I want to express my needs or boundaries?”

More on Nikita:

Nikita (they/them) is obsessed with dismantling how dominant culture conditions us to love, care, and be in relationship with humans and more than humans around us. They believe that a better future is possible if we embody pleasurable and abundant care in all our relations.

(image description: Desi babe with light skin and short black wavy hair gazes flirtatiously at their phone’s selfie camera next to art hanging on their wall. Their hair is cascading on the side of their face and has a subtle purple tint, their eyes are lined in blue and white eyeliner, their lips are colored in apple blossom shade of lipstick, and they are wearing a navy blue button down with a floral print.)

Amanda Machado

In the sixth workshop workshop of this series, Amanda Machado used writing prompts and group discussion to explore how we write about nature, land, and the outdoors in ways that also considers issues like ancestry, colonization, racial justice, migration trauma, sexuality, and more.

More on Amanda:

Amanda E. Machado is a writer and facilitator whose work explores how race, gender, power, and identity affect the way we travel and experience the outdoors. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Slate, Harper’s Bazaar, NBC News, Vox, The Week, Outside, REI Co-Op Journal, Quartz, Sierra Magazine, and many others. Her work has also been featured in the New York Times, NPR, National Geographic, Travel and Leisure, Longreads, Jezebel, the She Explores podcast, and several other publications, radio programs, and blogs.

In addition to her essay writing, Amanda also facilitates workshops on justice, anti-oppression, and storytelling for organizations around the world including REI, Patagonia, HipCamp, Kampgrounds of America (KOA), University of California Berkeley, and many others.

(Image Description: A Latinx femme with an undercut, wearing a bright green shit, and blue earrings, looking to the side in the desert near Joshua Tree)