Dallas Gudgell on Dakota ceremony, healing racial trauma, and right relationship with the earth The Matthew Green Podcast

Joining us from Boise, Idaho, Dallas Gudgell has spent 40 years campaigning for racial justice, nuclear disarmament and to overturn oppression in all its guises. With parallel careers as an environmental scientist, life coach and teacher of energy medicine, Dallas brings a Dakota perspective to the two biggest questions confronting America today: how individuals and society can heal from the trauma of white supremacy, and respond to the climate and ecological crisis. 

Dallas says that in the Dakota tradition, “healing takes place in the dark” – a reference to the power of sweat lodge ceremonies to metabolise the energetic imprints trauma leaves on individuals and communities. Matthew and Dallas explore how the protests over racial oppression in the United States and Britain could be an opportunity for healing – both for oppressed and oppressor. Dallas argues that a global resurgence in indigenous activism is teaching us that the human race is in crisis precisely because it has turned against its mother, the Earth. With Covid underscoring the potential for forging new global connections online, Dallas and Matthew conclude by exploring opportunities for taking trauma work at the personal and community level to a global scale.

NOTES:

Dallas Gudgell lecture on morality at The College of Idaho

Wassmuth Center for Human Rights

Dallas Gudgell interview on Rose Apple Sage

Dallas Gudgell on Entelechy Leadership Stories