Train Communities in Trauma Informed Care

Our team in Turtle Island just wrapped up a conflict tending series with teachers and educators in Oakland Unified School District in California. This partnership with the school district aimed to support educators to develop the skills and tools to tend to conflict in a trauma-informed, healing centered way. The series was rooted in abolition and grounded in healing justice. Participants engaged with practices to develop the skill of feeling their way through conflict.

Western culture enforces approaches to conflict tending that center punishment, intellectualization, and shame. Educators, especially, are faced with the challenge of moving through conflict within constraints that often require them to punish or exclude those who have caused harm in classrooms and collective spaces. This inevitably becomes reflected in our social justice spaces, where we often separate ourselves from harm as something done by others and not something we are all capable of engaging in.

This gap in empathy stands in the way of repair in our relationships. When we are unable to repair, we end up compartmentalizing our pain while we survive, bystand, enable, and even perpetuate the very dynamics we are fighting to disrupt. This series invited our educators to engage with something different.

Over six sessions, participants were able to explore:

- How conflict lives in our bodies, families, and cultures
- How white supremacy culture shapes our responses to harm
- How to tend to our wounds with care, not shame
- Liberatory values and practices rooted in land, lineage, and right relationship

Through this series, educators were able to reconnect to themselves, slow down, and approach conflict in a new, more grounded way. Our goal is for these practices to support them in both their interpersonal relationships, in social justice and education spaces, and in their relationships with the youth and adults they serve.

Healing Together Turtle Island (aptly named to honor Indigenous origin stories of what is now North America) continues working with educators, community organizers, immigrants, and children of immigrants to strengthen the skills needed to hold each other through the trauma of these times.

Tending to Conflict workshops

Through longtime partnerships with Teachers 4 Social Justice and Oakland Unified School District, we’re offering healing workshops that explore how collective and generational trauma wounds impact our responses to interpersonal conflict, in the classroom and beyond.

Taking inspiration from nature’s ecosystems, we invite healing-centered ways of tending to our wounds and our relationships when “repair” may not be possible, but ongoing practice can foster deeper connection and accountability.