Who Are We?
We at the Siinqee Institute are a network of Individuals and small groups coming together from across different social, cultural, political, racial, spiritual, and national boundaries. Our shared dream is to reclaim the core siinqee values of relationality, solidarity, equity, and justice to empower all women and facilitate engaged vibrant communities in sustainable environments.
The Siinqee Institute is founded by racialized migrant and refugee women who came from around the world and made Canada our home, but our members hail from various racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds. We are community-engaged practitioners, professionals, and scholars working with local and trans-local grassroots women’s groups, migrants, refugees, and Indigenous peoples locally and around the world.
We believe that local and Indigenous women’s knowing and their ways of being in the world inspire mutual empathy capable of transforming dominance and creating equitable caring relations among humans and all beings of the cosmos and the natural environment.
What is Siinqee?
Our name Siinqee comes from the deep wells of Oromo women’s ancient Indigenous knowledge system where siinqee is a symbolic stick representing women’s empowerment and sisterhood. We amplify the core siinqee values of relationality, solidarity, equity, and justice by deepening them with rich trans-local and Indigenous knowledge systems and reframing siinqee sisterhood for our global context.
As one of our members says, “siinqee is the greatest gift that Oromo women have given the world!” And we intend to nurture and grow that gift.
Our Core Values
The Siinqee Institute is a prefigurative space of emergence where our diverse group is held together by our shared commitments to the core values of relationality, solidarity, equity, and justice.
Relationality signifies the fundamental truth that all beings in the entire cosmos are equal, interconnected, and interdependent, and that all these beings are woven together by intricate checks and balances of harmonious relations to safeguard equity and justice. By relationality we understand the assumptions and beliefs from which all our praxes follow.
Solidarity signifies the struggle to restore the checks and balances in the harmonious relations of equity and justice when the fundamental truth of relationality is disrupted by forms of injustice, oppression, or discrimination. By solidarity, we understand both the joint calling out of societal structures of injustice out there, and the calling into ourselves on our own embodied injustice.
Equity signifies the fair distribution of power and resources among all beings of the cosmos. It is the goal of solidarity struggles imbued with mutual empathy and care, including reciprocity with the natural environment.
Justice signifies the restorative power of healing ruptured relationality. It is the goal of mending and repairing the ruptured egalitarian relations, harmony, and balance of the fundamental truth. Justice focuses on restorative processes of healing the whole in lieu of punishing the few.
In these core values of the Siinqee Institute, we have a complete wholistic process encapsulating relationality (the premise of our praxes), solidarity (our praxes), and equity and justice (the goals of our praxes).