Healing Haunted Histories: A Settler Discipleship of Decolonization (Center and Library for the Bible and Social Justice)

Healing Haunted Histories tackles the oldest and deepest injustices on the North American continent. Violations which inhabit every intersection of settler and Indigenous worlds past and present. Wounds inextricably woven into the fabric of our personal and political lives. And it argues we can heal those wounds through the inward and outward journey of decolonization.The authors write as and for settlers on this journey exploring the places peoples and spirits that have formed (and deformed) us. They look at issues of Indigenous justice and settler response-ability through the lens of Elaines Mennonite family narrative tracing Landlines Bloodlines and Songlines like a braided river. From Ukrainian steppes to Canadian prairies to California chaparral they examine her forebearers immigrant travails and trauma settler unknowing and complicity and traditions of resilience and conscience. And they invite readers to do the same.Part memoir part social historical and theological analysis and part practical workbook this process invites settlerChristians (and other people of faith) into a discipleship of decolonization. How are our histories landscapes and communities haunted by continuing Indigenous dispossession? How do we transform our colonizing self-perceptions lifeways and structures? And how might we practice restorative solidarity with Indigenous communities today?