Hear from a volunteer “Peace Team” member visiting Harrisonburg today. Their shared work is the celebration and defense of life and all that’s beautiful – addressing the stuff of decolonization, our grappling with white supremacy and patriarchy, our journey together with regards to race, gender, and many other constructions and expressions tied to our identities.

We hear from Christine Nobiss of Indigenous Iowa and Ethan Hughes of the Possibility Alliance of Missouri.

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The Peace Team (for lack of a better name), shares a vision of a multi-layered, decentralized movement rooted in integral nonviolence — a comprehensive way-of-life-nonviolence that balances self-transformation, social and cultural transformation, and bold, direct resistance to the domination system. We find unity, spiritually and politically, through a shared calling to defend life, to express radical love for the earth and all its inhabitants, and to honor an unshakable commitment to work at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, et al. At this stage, we hold two interconnected strands of the struggle as primary: protecting life in the face of climate catastrophe, and initiating bold, concrete expressions of atonement and reparations to those most impacted by white supremacy.

We believe that a team modeling bold, direct resistance to forces of domination and plunder will be best suited to catalyze and pull together the other elements of the integral nonviolence movement we long to be a part of. For that reason, we are beginning this effort by bringing together those of us who feel called to that particular strand of our vision. We do not wish or intend to somehow bend the macro-movement for justice to our way of doing things. We simply wish to create a space in the larger movement ecosystem where serious, disciplined nonviolence practitioners can show up as their full selves, shoulder to shoulder with their co-workers, in order to bring a unique gift to the struggle. We long to be of service to life and all that’s beautiful, and we are committed to doing so with loving, generous, and courageous hearts.