This Slow Study Course is a series of lectures and practice prompts from Bayo’s 2021 edition of We Will Dance With Mountains: Into the Cracks! wherein 1000+ people gathered. It is a carnivalesque course in postactivism, a matter of fissures, fault lines, cracks, openings, seismic shifts, endings, and fugitive marronage.

Lark shares about the relentless and direct activism Appalachians Against Pipelines has been doing to stop the pipeline, build community resistance, and advocate for the needs of their communities in the face of developers, oil and gas advocates, and a continued disregard for Appalachian voices.

We are challenged to think about our capacity, or willingness, to know invasive plants - Tusha queries listeners, “Do we know their reasons for making home in unfamiliar soils? Or what gifts and responsibilities they carry?” We are left with much to think about in the realm of curiosity and acceptance.

Yoalli brings us to the Chacahua-Pastoría Lagoons in Oaxaca, Mexico, to investigate deep connections with land, ongoing colonial violence, and the grief that comes alongside loving a place; a heartening conversation about the importance of ecological grief, rage, and sadness.

Antonia dives into the tension that exists in living in and caring for lands that have been violently colonized, calling listeners to understand plants both in the ways that colonization has affected their legacies, and within anti-colonial structures that suggest there are other ways to engage with the plants around us.

Mimi’s work is grounded in the question: “How do we find new ways to talk about what hurts?” Flipping diagnosis on its head, Mimi guides us to find new ways to name what we feel and to decolonize the language of feeling itself.

Brett shares how mass-incarceration and climate change are not crises of the individual, but of our culture. The abolitionist imagination may be the key to a collective future– as Brett reminds listeners that one can be both practical and utopian.

Claudia digs deep into food and the memories around it– from ancestral memory, to the way tastes for food are passed down through the womb. Claudia explains what it might mean to eat for the next seven generations, and how such future visions are tied to a greater decolonial project, as decolonizing the body and the landscape also means decolonizing the kitchen.

Ang reveals the complex relations within the hive and the multitude of lessons if we listen rather than impose. Rooting into the rich history of beekeeping and the folk traditions of their ancestors, Ang reminds us of the deeply interconnected world humans and bees share and the reciprocity inherent in right relationship.

Bayo Akomolafe guides listeners on a journey to lose oneself and leave behind the ties that bind us to world views that do not serve humanity’s wholeness. Bayo challenges us to lean into the “political un-project” that is fugitivity, blurring societally-imposed binaries, in order to better understand the human territory and to make more-than-human sanctuary through post activism.

Dr. Carroll pushes back against dominant settler histories about Cherokee migrations and relations to homeland and provides insight into what audience members ought to glean from Indigenous philosophies imparting practices of deep reciprocity, responsibility, and relationship to the land and each other.

Alexis elucidates that it is only through the messy process of owning up to these broken relations throughout time and seeing how we might participate in and take on culturally appropriate relations of repair, responsibility, friendship, and comradeship in the struggles for liberation that we can survive these times.

Dr. Osorio guides us into a fuller understanding of aloha by returning the commodified phrase to the more extensive understanding of aloha ‘āina, wherein the possibilities for other worlds are not only born but remembered and recalled from the long history of sovereign Hawai’i and traditional Hawaiian teachings and lifeways.

Covering the neuroscience of trauma, the habit of racism, and various typologies of systemic trauma, Dr. Ward provides insight into how we might consciously choose to activate our neuroplasticity toward justice rather than collectively rewarding our neuroplasticity for violence and oppression.

We discuss Kyle’s body of work on dystopia and fantasy in climate justice, the reproduction of settler structures, Indigenous science, vulnerability discourses, and “decolonizing allyship.” Kyle concludes with the ever present reminder that our work must be rooted in consent, reciprocity, and trust.

Ayana and Dr. Max Liboiron explore the notion of plastic as kin, oil and petrochemical subsidies, the body burden of plasticizers, the historical construction of disposability, the appropriation of Traditional Ecological Knowledge in academia, the feasibility of recycling, and more.

Ayana and Linda discuss what will be left in the wake of COVID-19, how will we tend to the wounds of disposability? What systems will endure? What must we dismantle and what will we grow? How can we deepen our actions so that they are not just a response to fear, but are rooted in the promise of collective wellbeing?

Richie and Ayana examine how harmful patriarchy is to us all, why we must let go of our limited understanding of crime, the geography of prisons, and meaningful and revolutionary organizing in prisons.

An ode to this “talisman of adaptation and creativity,” our interview with Rowen circles Native seeds, the myth of individual self sufficiency, the cultural dimensions of biodiversity, biocolonialism and safeguarding agricultural heritage against patenting, seed work as slow work, and reweaving cultures of belonging.

Tiokasin shares about the savior mentality that can arise when we act to address the many issues that threaten Earth and kin at this moment. Rather than being guided by solutions and salvation, we acknowledge where we are at in this consciousness and how we can challenge ourselves to give back to the Earth without intrusion.