Principles of Unity: Updated!

The Reclaiming Tradition's Principles of Unity have been updated! Discussions began online in September 2020 as the BIRCH council met to discuss alterations to the fifth paragraph of the POU. Changes were agreed upon and then proposed to the wider community by the DARC council - Decolonizing Actions in Reclaiming Communities - which is made up of BIPOC Witches (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) from Reclaiming community around the world. Then in January, BIRCH council again met online with representatives from various communities, to make a final decision.

This is the new version of the fifth paragraph as it was agreed upon officially on 30 January 2021! This reflects the changes proposed by DARC, which all communities had a chance to discuss between September's meetings and January's.

"Our tradition honors the wild, and calls for service to the earth and the community. We work in diverse ways, including nonviolent direct action, for all forms of justice: environmental, social, political, racial, gender and economic. We are an anti-racist tradition that strives to uplift and center BIPOC voices (Black, Indigenous, People of Color). Our feminism includes a radical analysis of power, seeing all systems of oppression as interrelated, rooted in structures of domination and control."

I am also now updating the Principles of Unity as they have been on our blog's "About" page, to reflect this new version. Hopefully this is the first of several much-desired updates for our documented agreed-upon values as a tradition. ⭐ You can read Reclaiming's blog about this update here.

Anti-Racism Resources

Hello, friends!

Ember (also known as Cara elsewhere on the internet) has been keeping up a list of anti-racism resources on their personal blog, so we wanted to share it here, as well.

Reclaiming -- like any group -- has work to do in terms of supporting everyone in our communities, specifically in becoming more anti-racist and trans-affirming, and in addressing all sorts of internalized prejudices we have learned from the society and systems in which we were brought up. As a tradition, Reclaiming was created with the idea of bringing together politics and spirituality. Social justice magick is no strange or rare occurrence in Reclaiming, and neither is activism. It's one of the reasons we love it so much! One of the biggest things we hear from other Pagans and Witches is "not to get too political", but Reclaiming Witches have always acknowledged our political reality. That was built in from the moment this community began, as the activists who created this movement typically met through political actions. So we do have that slight head start in that we don't have to argue with one another about whether or not we see Witchcraft as political. But that doesn't mean we don't still have even more work to do as a global community, or as individuals, or smaller community groups. We can always do even better than we have before. These are issues that are talked about continuously in Reclaiming, and those conversations won't be stopping anytime soon. Not as long as these issues still exist.

Here is a link to the blog post where Cara is collecting various resources. Some are Pagan- or Witchy-specific, while others are general anti-racism resources.

One of the specific resources from that page is actually Reclaiming-specific, so we'll link it here separately. And that is, A statement from BIPOC within the Reclaiming Tradition of Witchcraft on the subject of anti-racism practices.