Danika Nesbit - A Long Way From Home: a Mongrel Selkie's Lament

Modernity/Coloniality Grief-Tending: Singing with the Ancestors

Danika Nesbitt is a third to sixth-generation descendent of Irish, English and Scottish emigrants, settlers and convicts from what’s come to be called Australia.

Consumed for several years now by the phenomenon of modernity/coloniality and the question of just how to be ‘an ancestor worth claiming’ in these so very troubled times of ours, this workshop is an invitation into this reckoning continued.

Part talk, part serenade, and part facilitated interaction with each other based on Joanna Macy’s ‘The Work That Reconnects’, Danika’s workshops seek to make space to simply be together with some of the confusion, grief and ancestral inheritances (the good, the bad, and everything in-between) that we walk with now.

The workshop is underpinned by a handful of traditional ballads, including a beloved Caoineadh from the lineage she is inter-generationally estranged from yet unequivocally claimed by - a testament to the presence of our ancestors and the ways they reach us so that we may more wholeheartedly meet the times we find ourselves in.

In these spaces, Danika makes a case for nuance, trickster 'third way' complexity and deep compassion beyond what we're too often offered by the beasts of modernity/coloniality. She supposes that de-coloniality asks of us both a willingness to soften into not-knowing, as well as remember that which does know through us - namely Old Songs and other seeds that our ancestors have buried in us.

Offset with humour and radical candour, resourced in song and each other, this enquiry is offered to your deep-time animal and soul, who knows things were not always this way, and can be another way still.