How do communities meet their needs without being consumed, and how can we serve them while staying whole ourselves? This online research course uses Dr. W. Joye Hardiman's Ten Strategies for Indigestibility and her wisdom text, The Ra-Surrection of Truth from the Chains of Falsehood, which will be provided at no cost to students, as primary texts. Drawing on Ancient Egyptian (Kemetic), African, Intra-African, Caribbean African, Mexican, and Puyallup traditions, students will study three kinds of communities that refused to be consumed. Maroon communities freed themselves and built self-governing lives outside the systems built to hold them. Movement communities organized from within to resist and refused to assimilate. Inside communities met a need and healed themselves while still inside the belly of the beast.

Course Themes:Resistance and refusal; self-determination and self-governance; healing and balance restored through land, plants, and water, and through ceremony, story, and song; and transformation, modeled by a butterfly's metamorphosis.

Learning Goals:Students will learn and apply the Ten Strategies for Indigestibility. They will compare how diverse traditions sustain community wholeness and connect familial, ancestral, and historical experience to present-day resilience. They will also design practical, culturally grounded responses to real community needs while caring for their own wholeness.

Student Expectations: Each week, students learn a resistance strategy and apply it to their own lives and to a real community need. Students are expected to complete weekly readings, take an active part in online discussions, keep a reflective journal, and do research at the familial, ancestral, and historical levels. Students should come ready to share, listen, and learn from one another as a community of researchers. This work culminates in a final Indigestibility Blueprint and a class presentation shared with the online learning community.