REACH Cohort Member: Fierce Allies
Client Partner: Lisa Donahue and Lucia Colombaro, various organizations

Lisa Donahue is a leader impacting many individuals and organizations in the nature connection field. She began working with Fierce Allies in July 2020, with a commitment to hold herself accountable for the forms of white supremacy and colonization present in the community and to better position herself to leverage her positional power to increase the field’s capacity to do the same. BIPOC members of the nature connection field, especially Indigenous community members, had spoken up over many years about the harm caused by the field’s rampant misappropriation and commodification of Indigenous lifeways. They were met with no capacity to cease harm.

One of the organizations where Donahue served as a board chair, for instance, had a land-based framework that was “inspired” by “indigenous cultures around the world.” In 2018, a member of the organization’s community died in a sweat lodge held on the organization’s white founder’s land. This tragic death caused harm not only to the community member’s surviving family (including her husband and son), friends, and community but also to the reputation of the sweat lodge and the Native community to whom this practice of purification ceremony belongs. In a Harm Impact Statement presented at the time, Donahue listed those who were harmed beyond the victim’s family and community: “All of those who were present on the land that day…The Native community Jumano Apache of Redford, Texas, who considered [the victim] an adopted member. The reputation of the Inipi ceremony. All Native people. The Native people who practice Inipi. Other people who practice Inipi. Future generations of people, Native or otherwise, who might practice/benefit from Inipi.”

Credit: Hannah Peters

In 2020, the victim’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the organization, its founder, and several others. Because of the pending lawsuit, the organization’s lawyers advised implicated parties not to speak to each other about the case, so as to not generate evidence. This caused those involved to become suspicious of one another and thwarted any impulse toward a restorative justice process.

When George Floyd was murdered later that year, the organization, like so many at the time, released a statement of support and commitment to anti-racism. Donahue said the statement was not met with universal approval, as members of their community spoke up to ask, “How can you make these statements when your practices don’t back it up?” Donahue added, “These were not from strangers. These were from people who knew us for a long time. While initially I felt defensive, I appreciated the feedback.” One suggestion Donahue received was to reach out to J. Miakoda Taylor at Fierce Allies.

The Harm Impact Statement that Donahue wrote was part of her initial work with Taylor. It is a restorative justice tool, where offenders take responsibility for the harm they have caused and write a detailed account of the event, noting what happened, who was impacted, and how their lives were affected by the events. The Harm Impact Statement is part of the Fierce Allies’ Reckoning and Reparations practicum, a reparations preparedness training for people wanting to disrupt their complicity in harmful patterns, repair what was harmed, rematriate what was stolen, and leverage their various forms of power for healing and restoring right relationships. Writing this statement illuminated how the community member’s death was an extreme consequence of the organization’s elaborate history and “constellation of harms.” Following the Harm Impact Statement, Donahue and Taylor began tailoring the Reckoning and Reparations practicum in order to lead a process of accountability and meaningful change within the organization being called into account for this tragic event. However, after the “introductory” session with Fierce Allies, it became clear to Donahue that the organization did not have the will to continue this work of collective accountability. According to Taylor, the white male staff were particularly obstructive to the initial process. In response, Donahue, as board chair, initiated and completed the process to dissolve the organization.

The death of a community member might be an extreme example of the disconnect from the values around the Indigenous lifeways an organization supposedly espoused. But this disconnect from the values of centering community, using restorative justice, and holding each other accountable in the face of conflict and harm was nevertheless common throughout the field.

Credit: Fierce Allies’ Reckoning + Reparations Practicum

However painful and difficult this episode was, Donahue was committed to carrying out the Reckoning and Reconciliations practicum in the broader nature connection field, and she asked Taylor at Fierce Allies to support the work she was doing at the Nature Connection Network (NCN). NCN’s mission is to encourage and support its member organizations in building healthy, resilient, and regenerative communities. NCN members include schools and community-based organizations that teach various forms of Indigenous knowledge and lifeways through curricula commonly referred to as “nature connection.” The network’s Leadership Circle is made up of NCN member representatives, including Donahue. In 2022, the organization initiated what the leaders call a “Transformational Year,” which was a response—admittedly an overdue one—to long-standing and increasingly vocal complaints from its Indigenous members about cultural misappropriation.

Caption: Early settlements in New England showing an distribution of Indian Tribes.

Many of the white-led nature connection organizations in the NCN community have a history of misappropriating and commodifying Indigenous knowledge and lifeways without permission or reciprocal compensation. The absence of meaningful relationships between the nature connection teachers of these ideas and the lineages from which they originate is not only an extractive process that often leads to the integrity of the teaching being compromised, but it is also a harmful misrepresentation of the culture and context from which these teachings come, if that context is mentioned at all.

When Lucia Colombaro was invited to join the NCN Leadership Circle, she was given the charge of “interrupting patterns of harm, in particular addressing the question of basing the livelihoods of white-led ‘nature connection’ organizations on the cultural misappropriation of Indigenous lifeways.” In November 2022, Colombaro, as the newest member of the NCN Leadership Circle at the time, shared her own journey on this topic for the organization she founded on the NCN website. She writes:

“In reaching out to BI&PoC educators to work with me, I was asked right away if I had done a Permission Ask of the Massachusett Tribe to use the land we had rented for our program. My pursuit of a Permission Ask quickly opened up much bigger questions for me, foremost among them:

“What do the members of the Massachusett Tribe want from this land?

“What do they want for their children and themselves in ‘eliminating barriers between themselves and the natural world’?

“As I brought these questions to Faries Gray, the Sagamore of the Massachusett Tribe, the ‘matrix’ of our cultural worldview dissolved; these questions were not intellectual, philosophical, or program-related questions anymore; they were literal…

“Faries was answering the questions about what the Massachusett Tribe wanted from this land and for their children, families, and communities. And here I was, coming from the experience of so many nature connection network organizations and schools, living day-to-day what Faries wanted for his children on their ancestral land with this crux: teaching Indigenous lifeways and in direct contact with the land on a daily basis, and making a living doing it.

“I cannot get past this. It is not right.” ¹

J. Miakoda Taylor was also no stranger to NCN or the dynamics Colombaro described. Over the previous decade, Taylor at Fierce Allies had done intensive leadership training and curriculum redesign work with another white-led nature connection organization. This group had already established itself as one of the field’s standard bearers for being in appropriate relationships with the teachers and lineages where their work originates. That said, they were unable to retain BIPOC participants in their year-long-intensive program. They engaged Taylor to help them recognize, interrogate, and dismantle the settler colonialism tendencies undermining their retention of BIPOC participants. Taylor explains, “The BIPOC participants were dropping out not because the white facilitators were sharing misappropriated content or delivering it improperly, but because they were experiencing unconscious microaggressions from the other white participants, and the white leadership team was unable to skillfully navigate and facilitate these harmful offenses. The people of color could only endure so much before they would drop out of the program.” (Since working with Taylor in 2018, this organization’s BIPOC retention rate has changed from 1% to 55% and BIPOC staff composition for adult programs increased from 25% to 60%.)

Colombaro also remembers seeing Taylor co-present at the annual NCN conference in 2021 with Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd of Queer Nature, calling the field at large to collectively direct their attention towards efforts of reparation and rematriation. According to Colombaro, NCN made a “concerted effort” to have BIPOC speakers like Taylor and Sinopoulos-Lloyd at the conference. While their presentation generated “a surge of energy, connection, and hope,” there was “a lack of capacity and receptivity for this majority white group to know how to integrate that and work equitably and reparatively.” So when Dohahue invited Colombaro to be her “accountability partner” in her individual leadership development work with Taylor, Colombaro thought it was the perfect opportunity for her to leverage this opportunity to make changes at NCN.

Caption: NCN 2023 Leadership Circle members during a retreat. Clockwise: Amy Hyatt, Iya Oludoye, Lisa Donahue, Estephanie Martinez-Alfonzo, Maggie Gotterer, and Lucia Colombaro.

From the beginning of NCN’s Transformational Year, the Leadership Circle had a stated intention to be transparent, with membership and others, about their individual and collective self-examination. On their website, they acknowledge the criticism they have received, detail the work they are undertaking, and invite members’ participation in the next steps. They have held online discussions “to share our commitments, thinking, and new financial and structural models, all stemming from our commitment to cease harm and break the patterns that perpetuate it, be more conscientious visitors on stolen land, and co-create an advancement of nature connection that is rooted in service to and love for all Life on Earth starting with each other.”

The conversations were not comfortable. Along the way, the Leadership Circle has lost some people. Colombaro says, “Leading up to the commitment to the Transformational Year, people took themselves out. I think it’s worth observing that all the white men had left, as well as one of the four white women. And then I came in. We’ve been this group of six women working through a shared leadership model for the past year.” A few of the men who left were the same obstructive parties Taylor referred to in the other organizational work they had done with Donahue.

Both Donahue and Colombaro credit Fierce Allies in helping them become more aware of their relationship to power as white leaders, and that “with practice, we can embody and walk a different way in the world, with our dignity and vulnerability.” Donahue says, “One of the first practices that Miakoda introduced, in the first session that I had with them, is the Dignity Practice. You’re invited to close your eyes or soften your gaze and really consider all the ways in which your body takes up space and is connected both to the earth and to your historical ancestors and future generations.”

Taylor further explains about this “somatic tool for trauma healing” that is “foundational” to their practice: “The Dignity Practice is an adaptation of the Generative Somatics centering practice. At the core, it is designed to support people to fully inhabit your body, release the contractions that both make one small and undermine your ability to feel and make your fullest, wisest self available to impact as well as be impacted by and respond to what is happening around you, especially the feedback you are unable or uncomfortable letting in. It’s also a tool for slowing things down. Ultimately, we’re really giving ourselves access to the resources of our skin, the earth, our length, our depth, which includes what’s behind us, the past, and what’s in front of us, the future. All kinds of new responses become possible when we have all of those dimensions consciously and humbly alive and integrated into our individual and collective body. People are invited to track and share the sensations that are alive in their bodies as difficult conversations or thoughts are coming through. This combination slows things down and allows people to be impacted by each other, allies and adversaries alike, in ways that are much more choiceful, skillful, and holistic. As a group practice, it also allows us to re-member ourselves to one another, and all of our other relations, as one collective body, as one ecosystem.”

Donahue says, “This is a practice that we did at the beginning of every session, and it took me some time personally to really feel the power of it. But it’s something that now I use almost all the time just to understand my own power—where I abuse it or where I don’t use the power that I have—and what healthy power looks like. I can do it internally. We would even take turns facilitating it in our sessions with Miakoda. We also did a practice called Memoir of Power which helped me understand my historical relationship to power and the ways in which that relationship was formed from past experiences, which was quite revealing and very uncomfortable. And now I can walk with that understanding and create for myself a path that says, ‘I have power. I can use it in a healthy way. I can make change in a way that reflects who I am and why I’m here, and how I came to live in this body, in this life. If my goal is to upset and disrupt other structures of power, I have to be able to understand my own before I can do that. I didn’t learn that in school or in any organization. It was almost unseen to me.”

Taylor went on to facilitate Donahue and Colombaro’s learning, un-learning and development using tools and practices from the Reckoning and Reparations practicum. The practicum helps participants locate themselves more expansively within an ecosystem (connection to earth and others) and across time (connection to ancestors and future generations). Colombaro finds this “relational” focus (as opposed to “transactional” or “extractive”) resonates with the reparative compensation work that she was asked to lead at NCN. This alignment enables her to bring these values into the larger network. Colombaro says, “We have access to practitioners and teachers [like Taylor] who have fully developed pedagogies and curricula that serve the different aspects of what people go through when they start to engage an anti-racist and decolonizing work.”

Colombaro reflects, “I found the work with Miakoda to be deeply liberating. I think the biggest impact for me is the repeated experience of giving ourselves the permission to not repeat these patterns that make me feel sick to my stomach and that I can visibly see cause harm, and permission to do things differently, to unlearn just so many of the obstacles to and restraints onto my own capacity to be consciously, intentionally interrupting dynamics that are harmful, and to hold questions. And also just this deep affirmation of never ceding our dignity.”

The NCN Leadership Circle wants to make the liberatory practice of the Reckoning & Reparations practicum available to every member in NCN but recognizes that members—white people and BIPOC—might have different histories with (internalized) white supremacy and therefore at different places of this journey.

Moved by a lack of capacity by previous members of NCN Leadership to engage collaboratively with Fierce Allies and other BIPOC leaders within the network, Colombaro and two BIPOC members in the Leadership Circle designed “The Collaborative Developmental Ecosystem,” or the CoDE. As part of the “Transformational Year,” the CoDE started with gauging the capacity of a group of ready members, or early adopters, to take on this work. In the next phase, the CoDE will work with all members to self-identify their will in adopting a decolonizing approach to this work and the challenges unique to their organizations. Members are then able to find others with similar issues or concerns to build a specific community of practice, facilitated by practitioners with appropriate skills. In short, the CoDE leverages pockets of solidarity within the existing network and cultivates receptivity where before there was not. The Reckoning & Reparations practicum offered by Fierce Allies is by design a part of the CoDE. In addition, the process of growing the CoDE is revealing and valuing other resources and skills that are already available within the network, particularly from BIPOC practitioners. Currently, NCN is looking at collaborative grant-seeking and a new membership fee structure, so that everyone can have access to the resources available in the CoDE that they could not afford on their own. In doing so, the network aspires to move towards a more relational paradigm, whereas before it was more hierarchical and transactional.

“We definitely have a horizon that we’re looking towards,” continues Colombaro, “but with an understanding that this is emergent and iterative work, That doesn’t make it amorphous or infinite, but inherent in the work is that it’s a learning process.”

Donahue adds, “We are absolutely dedicated to working relationally. We’re dedicated to being in service to our member organizations. And that for me is at odds with a rigid timeframe. We can’t take everyone with us at first, but we do not intend to leave anyone behind. Everybody’s on their own journey. I can talk about the sense of urgency and the need for racial equity today or 200 years ago, but it doesn’t change how humans work and how change necessarily needs supportive relationships. That is a process that will take time.”

“Another point of clarity came from Faries Gray of the Massachusett Tribe,” says Colombaro. “He asked, ‘Why do you [Europeans] keep sending your unwanted?’ as we looked at the Harbor Islands [across the Boston Harbor]. From that vantage point, looking out over the water, I began to see literally the energetic and physical flow of people out of Europe to the rest of the world as colonizers. I recognize that his question is one that I must consider and look to for guidance forward: the fact that Europeans have unwanted is a source of harm. We have to find a way not to have unwanted people in our work. So what we’re really putting forth in NCN is to allow and support people to determine when they’re ready to step closer in alignment with the new premises and principles.”