Remember, repair, reconnect:
An extended land-based workshop with Susan Raffo
November 18-22th 2026
Creiff Hills Retreat Centre
Puslinch, ON, Canada
Hatiwendaronk, Anishinaabe, & Haudenosaunee Land
Registration Opens July 20th, 2026
ABOUT SUSAN RAFFO
Susan Raffo (she/her) is a white queer writer, cultural worker, bodyworker and mother with a personal practice who is living on Dakota lands in Mnisota Makoce, in the city of Minneapolis. Her work focuses on the layers of resourcing needed to support community and movements, from support for individual and collective bodies shaped by generational trauma and supremacy to support for infrastructures that are grounded in dignity, care and generational vision.
Raffo spent 12 years working with Cara Page on the Healing Histories Project, an abolitionist project working in solidarity with health and healing practitioners/workers by holding with dignity and respect the lives and communities they care for. HHP’s main tool is Stories Of Care & Control, a timeline of the medical industrial complex.
Raffo is also a core group member of REP, a Black-led network showing up to support others in moments of crisis or urgency, with care and respect for the full dignity and autonomy of those in crisis.
Raffo is the author of Queerly Classed (1997), Restricted Access (1999), and Liberated to the Bone (AK Press: 2022). In January 2025, Raffo completed a year of walking from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific and is currently completing a book about this.. Find her at www.susanraffo.com.
"Plantain root. Dandelions. Some of the elms planted along the boulevards, german chamomile, pineapple weed, thistle, comfrey, all of the kinds of clover, motherwort, mugwort, and mullein. All of the plants I just mentioned, medicinal plants. Carried over in the pockets of settlers who brought their pharmacy with them, seeds they spread in their gardens who then escaped and became, like their sowers, transplants that crowded out what had been here before. This doesn’t stop them from being medicinal. This doesn’t stop them from being colonizers. And here is the challenge in being healers here on this land who are not original to this land." — Susan Raffo, It always starts with the land
About:
This is a workshop I have been building since walking across Turtle Island in 2024. It is not a workshop that claims to be the answer to five hundred + years of colonization, but it is a workshop that wants to be a practice.
For those of us whose people long ago forgot that we are only one small part of the land that is our kin, how do we find our way back into something that is good? How are we part of something that might mean our descendants are a little less lost than their recent ancestors?
What to Expect:
Our time together practices three different layers of relationship with land: the physical sensed truth of relationship, the memories of our people’s generational relationship to land, and the clarity of repair and accountability that seeks to change what is possible for all of our descendants. The majority of my ancestors are European Catholics who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the mid- to late 19th century. Some of them brought land memory with them that lasted until my lifetime and some did not. This life experience is what shapes this workshop even as this might not be your people’s story.
Participants can expect a mix of group work and solo work, brief directions that invite you to go off and see what happens and then sometimes highly choreographed practices. At least one morning where you can sleep in if you need to and another where you will be invited to rise with the sun. An agenda that will likely change as we come together in real time and not in strategy time.
For those registering, you will receive a guide for pre-work about a month before we gather.
Doing this pre-work will help deepen our short time together. After all, moving at the speed of the land is not the same as moving at the speed of a workshop.
This workshop will have a maximum of 24 participants.
A portion of what you pay for this workshop will go directly towards projects that support Indigenous land and cultural work and reclamation.
If you have any questions about the content of the workshop, please reach out to Susan Raffo at raffomn@pm.me.
For questions about logistics and registration, please reach out to: assistant@wildbody.ca
Location:
Creiff Hills retreat centre covers 250 acres of forest, trails, and farmland. Located just an hour from the Toronto Airport, and 30 minutes from Guelph and Hamilton. Our workshop home occupies the ancestral lands of the Hatiwendaronk, the Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee peoples and is on the treaty lands and territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit.
Owned and operated by the Presbyterian Church of Canada, the centre welcomes people from all faiths and traditions. Participants will have access to trails and our daily gatherings will take place inside one of the centres’ conference hall.
You can learn more about our location here: crieffhills.com
Registration Opens July 20th, 2026
Pricing
Details coming soon.
There are a variety of cost options available. Residential retreats include three daily meals and four nights accommodation in a single or shared room. Commuter rates are also available.
Deadline to register is October 28th, 2026