I so appreciate my now well-marked copy of Denise Nadeau’s Unsettling Spirit as it offers tremendous insights into what embodied and on-the-ground work looks like for those committed to decolonization. Building on years of feminist practice and relational learning with Indigenous women, Nadeau provides an honest reckoning of her personal and ongoing pathway. This book is just what we need as settlers increasingly look for ways to address racial injustice and reconciliation.
Denise Nadeau is fierce in unsettling spirit. Her pilgrimage through her faith journey shows the way to decolonizing with deep honesty and truth, laying a path for anyone brave enough to do the work that needs to be done. Brava!
I was both thrilled and unsettled to find such an honest account of another white woman settler’s efforts to excavate her own relationship to colonial history, Indigenous ways of knowing and political struggles. Unsettling Spirit reminded me once again that a journey into decolonization is a life-time endeavour filled with difficult conversations, beautiful encounters, humble moments, and new understandings of spirit. Denise Nadeau gives us the courage to be there, in the discomfort and openness that is an inevitable part of any reconciliation process.
Through stories with embodied practice and relationships with Indigenous communities, Nadeau brings light to the complexity and joys involved in shifting ways of being in respectful relationship with the earth and all living beings. Unsettling Spirit is a valuable read and resource for white settlers trying to engage meaningfully with decolonization.
“Complex, engaging, and thought-provoking, Unsettling Spirit is a sophisticated story of an unfinished journey into decolonization.”
“Nadeau turns her spiritual quest into a public pedagogical goal, engaging her activist and embodied experience with unrelenting courage through dialogue with a solid array of interdisciplinary research.”
Denise Nadeau 