Sovereignty, Self care and the practise of Aqwir

Wednesday, 25 March 2020 - 7:00am to 8:30am

Hello! Quick message from the Wednesday Breakfast Team: whilst we have the current health panedmic going on we will be altering how we make/produce our show . But! We will still be on air, albeit a little more creatively than usual. Whilst we are figuring out what our show is looking like, this week we took the time to listen back to some speeches that I collected earlier in Feburary at the "Activism at the Margins conference" held in Melbourne 

Wednesday 25th of March 

Our first speaker is Jim Everett, Puralia Meenamatta  – a plangermairreenner man, Turbuna-Meenamatta, Tasmania. Puralia is a poet playwright, and writer. In this speech, ‘Australia’s Awakening: Imagining a New World A history of the Aboriginal Struggle’, he explores Australia’s claim to Sovereignty over unceded lands and the ludicrousness of citizenship in colonial Australia, as well as his own journey as a storyteller.  

Our second speaker is Scheherazade Bloul and Achraf El Idrissi discussing the practise of Aqwir, a traditional organisational method recently used in Morroco’s summer resistance, the #HirakRif Resistance. Scheherazade and Achraf discuss the signifcance of Aqwir as a direct Indigenous response to the shutdown of freedoms occurring across the country, and way to meet and organise both offline and on. 

Finally, we have an exerpt from South African development worker,social commentator and writer, Malebo Sephodi  who discusses the need for self care as a tool of liberation. Whilst focused to Malebo's own story, it is a timely reminder of the need for self care as forms of presevation and health in times of crisis. This audio is external to the conference and from Malebo's TED talk, accessible here