Movement for Black Lives Strategy Retreat
March 25-27, 2016 UMass Amherst
An intergenerational, multi-tendency, national retreat held by and for leaders of the U.S. Black Liberation movement, including Black Lives Matter, Ferguson frontline activists, and elders from the Black Panthers and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Eritrea Nonviolent Resistance Strategy Workshop
June 1-5, 2016 UMass Amherst
A networking meeting and strategy session – a broad-based nonviolence training – to connect Eritrean resisters and their allies, both inside and outside of the Horn of Africa country. Sponsored by the Resistance Studies Initiative, in close coordination with the Asmara-based “Freedom Friday” Arbi Harnet movement.
Native Indigenous Resistance Gathering
March 15-18, 2019 UMass Amherst
The Resistance Studies Initiative together with a Native American planning group organized a Continental Resistance Gathering of Native Americans with 45 participants, from different Tribes, Nations and Indigenous movement organizations, in order to explore experiences of Indigenous resistance on "Turtle Island" (North America). Participants were a mix of Elders and young Natives, women and men, learning from each other, discussing both Indigenous insurgencies and everyday resistance in the form of recreating Indigenous culture and ways of life, as well as rebellions like the American Indian Movement, Idle No More, the Zapatistas and Standing Rock.
Workshop on Intersectional Resistance Alliances
Oct 11-14, 2019 Voluntown Peace Trust, CT
The Resistance Studies Initiative organized an explorative workshop on Intersectional Resistance Alliances with 20 participants from seven different identity groups: Muslims, LGBTQI-Queers, Black, Hispanics-LatinX, Asian-Pacific, working class, Indigenous, and whites. The idea was to together investigate both the challenges/problems that make intersectional resistance alliances of grassroots movements so difficult, and the possible models/solutions of how such alliances could be formed. As a basis of the gathering RSI made an inventory of previous initiatives, models and experiences that movement organizations have gathered, in the form of a report that facilitated the discussions.
The Boriken Declaration A report back from the Gathering of the Americas: Resistance, Environments, Decolonization, Indigeneity (In English y en Espanol)
January 17-20, 2020 Adjuntas, Puerto Rico
Delegates from across the Caribbean basin gathered in the occupied nation of Puerto Rico. In attendance were representatives of movements from Venezuela, Haiti, Trinidad, indigenous Mexico, and the occupied territories of the United States including from the lands of the Lenape, Ute, and Haudenosaunee (six nations) Confederacy. They came with a shared commitment that peoples have the right and power to “radically decolonize and re-envision their own communities on their own terms.”
