The “Games for Decolonization” project’s primary output of research creation is the Tarot for Decolonization Deck. Guided by the scholarship of Mimi Khúc (creator of the Asian-American Tarot and Games for Decolonization Workshop participant) and facilitated by Indigenous Two Spirit tarot practitioner and author of Red Tarot (2024) Christopher Marmolejo (also a Games for Decolonization Workshop participant), the Tarot for Decolonization Deck will adapt the mechanics of Tarot to facilitate dialog and shared storytelling on Indigenous and settler relationships to land, history, and sovereignty.
The Tarot for Decolonization Project seeks to cultivate a deeper understanding of decolonization through arts-based and co-creative research mobilization, specifically focusing on Tarot as a methodology for shared, relational, and dialogic storytelling. The primary goals are to foster dialogue on decolonization, Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, and Indigenous and settler relationships to land by developing opportunities for story-sharing and relationship-building between Indigenous and settler community members. By connecting creators with Tarot scholars and practitioners, industry partners, and decolonial educators, this project will create new approaches to re-storying Canadian history and relationships to land through a reimagined and decolonized approach to Tarot.
Traditionally, tarot cards have been seen as a tool that purportedly helps the player gain insight into the past, present or future. However, tarot does this work through a kind of relational spontaneous storytelling that takes place between the player and the reader. Moving away from the occult associations of this activity, our project positions the methodological practice of reading tarot cards as an opportunity to cultivate a relational and dialogic understanding of settler colonialism and its impacts that emerge through a storytelling engagement with decolonial themes.
Each card in the Tarot deck carries a wealth of symbolic imagery. These symbols act as triggers for storytelling, inviting the reader and querent (person who is having the reading done) to explore their meanings in the context of the question or situation at hand. The reader then weaves these meanings together by considering not only individual cards but also the relationships between them, compelling the querent to similarly draw out relationships to and between the cards. Card combinations create a narrative flow, encouraging a more nuanced and interconnected storytelling experience.
At the heart of this initiative is the development of the deck as a tool designed to facilitate reflection on settler colonialism in Indigenous and settler spaces. Tarot will serve as a heuristic and methodological framework to foster shared storytelling, inviting users to reimagine relationships to land, sovereignty, and reconciliation to deepen understanding and foster critical reflection on our shared history of settler colonialism. Moreover, as a potential or intended divinatory tool, the Deck has further applications in healing past trauma, advancing spiritual growth, and temporal reflection in advancing the work of truth and reconciliation. Storytelling through Tarot meaningfully engages a dialogic co-construction of time, not just of reader and querent, but with self and Spirit. In its divinatory application Tarot is thus able to break the stranglehold of “straight time” (Muñoz) to evoke an ontological shift. When practitioners engage the prophetic, revelatory, or augury and omens that the cards potentiate as a means to comprehend a temporal unity, the practice Tarot thus queers time and place, itself a decolonial tactic. Thus, in the context of truth and reconciliation, Tarot can not only foster new and relational understandings of the history and ongoing legacy of settler colonialism but also facilitate dialogue on decolonial/post-colonial futures.
A decolonized version of this process would then be two-fold. First, the questions posed would prompt reflection on the reader’s relationship to the land, settler colonialism, and/or Indigenous sovereignty. Secondly, the images presented on their cards themselves and their symbolic meaning would be reimagined to communicate essential concepts, ideas, symbols, and archetypes that connect with real lived Indigenous experience as well as to the process of truth and reconciliation.
Our preliminary Tarot for Decolonization event with Christopher Marmolejo took place on March 20, 2025, as part of the Games and Social Justice Public Lecture Series. This programming sought to test our methods for teaching decolonial issues through an arts-based approach to Tarot co-creation in advance of the larger Tarot for Decolonization Workshop scheduled to take place in February 2026.
March 20 @ 4:30 PM | “Divination for Decolonization” with Christopher Marmolejo
Dodson Room (302), Irving K. Barber Learning Centre & Online
This talk with engaged the Tarot as cypher for decolonizing consciousness. Within divination one can find a dignity that is denied in dominator culture. The cards are neurological pivots, subverting the logical dominance of society and self. They were discussed as tools to reengage alternative epistemologies assaulted by colonial imperialism. The tarot is an affective archive that, when supplanted with a liberatory language and framework, may challenge and delegitimize colonial structures within and without. Every reading then pushes forward the long-multi-pronged project of decolonization.
Christopher Marmolejo, MA, is a Brown, queer, and trans writer, diviner, and educator. They use divination to promote a literacy of liberation. They are the author of Red Tarot: A Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy, published by North Atlantic Books, Mar 05, 2024. They were born and raised in San Bernardino, California, in community with the Serrano people of the pines, the Yuhaaviatam Clan of the Maara’yam. With nine-plus years of experience as a trained educator focused on cultivating classrooms of emancipatory possibility, they work with students around the world to plant and nurture the seed of a divinatory practice, finely weaving tarot, astrology, and curanderismo with decolonial, queer epistemologies and critical, feminist pedagogies.
After the talk, participants were provided artistic tools and prompted to reflect on their own relationship to the unceded territories of Turtle Island through a series of questions devised to activate their archetypal interpretation.
If you’d like to participate in the Tarot for Decolonization Workshop in February 2026, please email pop.culture@ubc.ca.
In addition to the deck itself, the Tarot for Decolonization Project will exhibit its materials and process at the Koerner Library; produce a comprehensive set of teaching materials; publish findings in both public and academic platforms; and advocate for Tarot’s potential as a social-justice-oriented methodology in activist and educational spaces. Moreover, the Deck and materials produced will be showcased at the UBC Pop Culture Cluster’s Pop Pedagogies Symposium (2026) and housed in the Pop Pedagogies Archive of Educational Resources to support educators in engaging with popular media in teaching and learning. Lastly, the Deck will include a guide by Marmolejo that scaffolds the reading. This guide will support practitioners in engaging with the deck’s symbols and meanings, prompting critical reflection on relationships to land, colonialism, and Indigenous sovereignty. Ultimately, this project demonstrates Tarot’s transformative potential (Smith) and capacity for fostering discursive self-reflection, co-creative meaning-making, and transcultural dialogue. The Deck will, therefore, function not only as a theoretical exploration of decolonial storytelling but also as a practice that enables transformative dialogue and narrative co-creation in the spirit of truth and reconciliation.