Silver Threads

Still walking, still waking

2. The Body in Motion - Zainab Amadahy

Recognizing that anger and trauma often move people to join social movements, Zainab Amadahy speaks to the importance of healing and growth in activist spaces. In this episode of Silver Threads, Zainab talks with Eleanor and carla about the role of emotion in collective movements. She shares her own journey that led her to the understanding that transforming the world begins with self-exploration and healing. 

They also discuss overlapping ideas in recent Western science and long-held traditional Indigenous wisdom about the earth, the cosmos, mind-body healing, and how people impact each other with their emotional energies.

Zainab speaks to her current work with Children’s Peace Theatre, centering around decolonization and healing through art, and the exchange of knowledge across generational divides. She also speaks to our current moment in the pandemic as a time of immense transformation, and an opportunity to draw from Indigenous teachings to create a more just and cooperative society.

Zainab Amadahy

BIO

Zainab Amadahy has a multiracial background that includes African American, Cherokee, Seminal and European. She’s an author of screenplays, nonfiction, and futurist fiction. The most notable of our academic writings is Indigenous Peoples and Black Peoples in Canada: Settlers or Allies, co-authored with Mi’kmaq Professor Benita Lawrence. Today, Zainab writes for Muskrat Magazine and sits on their advisory council. In her role at Children’s Peace Theatre, She connects elders and senior artists with BIPOC youth who are exploring healing and decolonization through artistic processes. Based in peri-apocalyptic Toronto, Zainab is the mother of two grown sons and a cat who allows her to sit on one section of the couch.

Find Zainab on Twitter at @AmadahyZ.

About Silver Threads: still walking, still waking

carla bergman and Eleanor Goldfield interview long term organizers about their watershed moments, what they have learned along the way, and how they maintain their hope on this path; dreaming and building emergent worlds for a present and future that is anchored in justice and freedom for all.

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