The Oppression Tree Metaphor 

The Oppression Iceberg 

Over the last two decades, we have been working with groups to explore power, privilege, and systemic oppression. Early on in doing this work, we were introduced to the “Oppression Iceberg” from AORTA, a metaphor that is beautifully explained in this video from the Fireweed Collective. 

The iceberg metaphor is a helpful one in understanding oppression, particularly to show that much of what we call systemic oppression is not immediately visible or understandable. We also found it to have some limitations. Oppression is dynamic, mutable and cyclical, while icebergs often seemed to us to connote slowness, isolation, and frozenness. We also struggled to use the metaphor to describe how the different levels of systemic oppression - described in the iceberg as interpersonal, institutional, and cultural, interacted with each other. 

Developing the Oppression Tree 

In 2013, Emily Yee Clare, Kira Page, Annie Preston, and Bex Yu, were invited to host a series of anti-oppression training sessions for resident assistants and first year students at McGill University. In preparing for these trainings, we were playing with different ways of explaining oppression and co-created The Oppression Tree. We felt a living tree was an effective alternative analogy to illustrate the complexity, interdependent and shifting nature of oppression, while also demonstrating how deep - and, like the iceberg, underground - these systemic dynamics can be. 

Emily and Kira went on to use this metaphor into our facilitation work with community organizations via the Centre for Community Organizations (COCo), where we wrote a first blog post about the tool. Almost ten years later, we thought it would be time to give that blog post a refresh, and answer some of the questions we get about it the most. 

Trees are powerful teachers, and we are not the only ones who have developed or used this metaphor for this purpose. Notably, in 2011, the Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movement Ottawa created their own Tree of Colonial Oppression as well as a Liberation Tree. In 2018, Lukayo, an artist and facilitator based out of Ottawa, shared their metaphor of the Taking Tree, including a poster and a prezi, that they had been working with since 2010. Going even further back, the idea of using a tree as a metaphor for social systems is described in Beyond Race and Gender: Unleashing the Power of Your Total Workforce by Managing Diversity, written in 1991 by R. Roosevelt Thomas. 

Understanding the Oppression Tree Metaphor 

1. The Leaves: Visible Outcomes and Impacts

We use the leaves to represent the parts of oppression we observe and feel most directly in our daily lives. While we often see people focus on stereotypes, slurs or microaggressions here, we also include violent structural realities, such as unequal access to housing, disproportionate rates of incarceration, health disparities, or an absence of representation in the media.

2. The Trunk and Branches: Institutions, Policies, and Laws

The trunk represents the institutions, policies, and laws that create, protect, or normalize oppression. This might include schools and their curriculums that, for example, erase worker, immigrant, or Indigenous histories; legal frameworks like the Indian Act and historical policies like the Chinese Exclusion Act in Canada, the media landscape, and so on. The trunk is often the connection between the visible outcomes (leaves) of oppression and the deep roots (systems).  

3. The Roots: Systems and Ideologies

Under the earth, we have a deep network of roots that represent systems of oppression themselves, such as white supremacy, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, and capitalism. These systems of oppression are deeply rooted (get it?). 

The Tree is Cyclical 

Trees nourish themselves from the sun (photosynthesis) and from the water and nutrients in the soil. This applies to the metaphor as well: 

• Uptake / Absorption: the systems and ideologies (roots) feed the institutions and policies (trunk), which further increase the visible outcomes and harms of oppression (tree)

• Photosynthesis: the more obvious and immediate harms of oppression (the leaves) move through our institutions and policies (trunk and branches) and strengthen the underlying systems and ideologies (roots).

The Tree Survives Winter 

When social pressure or public scrutiny forces explicit bias out of sight, or when we solely focus our attention on changing the words and language we use, we might say that the tree sheds its leaves. But the tree is not dead; its roots remain fully alive beneath the frozen soil, waiting for the right conditions to sprout again. 

We saw an example of this during the beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic in North America when there was a surge in anti-Asian hate crimes, stereotyping, and explicit discriminatory sentiments being shared. Anti-Asian racism was not at all a new phenomenon, but rapidly became more visible and widespread (in the form of “leaves”) when the social and political conditions allowed for it. 

Intersectional Analysis

Trees rarely grow in isolation. In a forest, a "Racism Tree" and a "Classism Tree" share the same soil and intertwined root networks. They nourish and depend on one another. 

Clear-Cutting to Ecological Stewardship

One unhelpful implication of this metaphor is that we should eliminate oppression via clear cut logging! A reframe of this if the group gets stuck on this is to remind groups that dismantling oppressive systems isn't solely about clear-cutting harmful structures; it requires stewarding the soil and reintroducing native flora, cultivating new, sustainable ways of relating, healing, and caring for one another.

How to Use the Tool With Groups

Here is a short walk through of how you might use the tool with your team or a group training. 

1. Understanding the Metaphor (15-20 minutes)

Start by sketching a simple tree on a whiteboard or flipchart, and label the leaves as outcomes and impacts, the trunk as institutions and policies, and the roots as systems and ideologies. 

Take an example of a system of oppression that the group is likely to be more familiar with, depending on who they are and what they do. We often choose sexism. Use that example to fill in some examples on the leaves, trunk, and roots. Help the group make some connections between examples that are on the leaves, trunk, and roots, such as how an institution or a policy leads to a visible outcome of oppression, and vice versa. 

At this stage, you are ensuring the group understands the metaphor, and it can help to keep it fairly general - examples of sexism at the societal level. However, we do usually ask that groups keep their examples somewhat local - in our context, we might say “in Canada, or in Quebec”.  

2. Applying the Metaphor (20-30 minutes) 

We often do this second step in small groups of 4-5 people, depending on the size of the group you are working with. Provide flipchart paper and markers, and assign each group a specific "ism" - racism, ableism, etc - or give them the choice to choose an issue they are eager to explore. We often choose the “isms” based on what we know the group is less comfortable with, and might need to push themselves to understand more. 

Give them 20 minutes to map their own trees, encouraging them to move back and forth between the leaves, trunk, and roots.

Something to pay attention to here is allowing people some choice in what issues they want to discuss or not. For example, if someone is one of very few people in the room who is personally affected by an “ism”, they might not want to discuss it with a group of people who aren’t. One way we try to consider this is to label the topics of each sub group before the groups are formed, by saying something like “everyone who is interested in discussing colonialism can go in the far right corner of the room”, allowing people to choose which groups they are a part of. 

3. Debrief! (15-20 minutes)

Bring the group back together. Have each group present their tree. Some questions that can help the debrief push the understanding of oppression farther include:

• What shared root systems do we see across different trees?

• How do the leaves of one tree nourish the roots of another?

• What patterns do people see across the trees?

Applying the Tree Metaphor to their Work / Industry 

One regular use of the tree is to prompt participants to think of the tree concretely in their context. For instance, if you are facilitating a workshop for university students, ask them to map how systemic racism operates specifically within higher education or a residence system. If you are working with a group of women’s shelters, ask them to apply the tree to the shelter system, or the experience of working in nonprofits. 

We move to this activity quickly if the group already has a solid foundation in anti-oppressive politics, and wants to understand how it operates in their work. If this understanding is uneven across the group, or it is a group that is quite defensive, move more slowly towards understanding the immediate context. 

Organizational Trees 

A much more concrete application of this metaphor - but that can also be confronting, is to use it as a metaphor for the specific organization they are working in, if that applies.  We’ve adapted this framework into an internal organizational diagnostic tool, helping organizations audit their internal policies, workplace culture, and core values. We find it most helpful to:

• Naming the oppressive structures, policies, and outcomes at their organization

• Noticing the gaps. For example, between where a core value (which would be the roots), does not have any immediate connections to actual policies, procedures, or outcomes, or where there are “leaf level” fixes but not much in terms of policies or values to back that up. 

Intersectional Analysis 

You can push the group to think through intersectional trees. One easy way to do this is to use a system of oppression that is already intersectional in how it is described - such as misogynoir - and use this as the basis for working through an oppression tree. 

A real-world example we use at Saltwater to both model the tool and illustrate the real life applicability of the tool is to explore the  geographic boundary between the Parc-Extension (Parc-Ex) and the Town of Mount Royal (TMR) neighbourhoods in Montreal. They are separated by a 1.6 km chain-link fence built in 1960. You can probably find an example from your own context. 

When using this case study, we typically present the Oppression Tree and then show them a screen grab from the satellite view of Google Maps. We ask them what they notice, and to map it onto the tree itself.  

Participants point out that TMR features sprawling tree canopies, green spaces, and private pools, while Parc-Ex - a historically working-class, immigrant community, is covered in asphalt and tight multi-unit housing. These are the leaves of the oppression tree. We then trace down the tree about what might be the trunk and the roots. 

• The Leaves: Limited access to shade and recreational spaces, population density, and environmental vulnerability during climate events for Parc-Ex. 

• The Trunk: Municipal zoning decisions, discriminatory urban planning, privatized infrastructure, immigration policy, and the physical erection of barriers like the l'Acadie fence.

• The Roots: Environmental racism, classism, capitalism, and systemic disinvestment in immigrant and working-class communities.

Read Marcello Di Cintio's essay The Great Wall of Montreal in Geist as well as about urban heat islands and spatial division in The Rover’s reporting on Heat Waves in Parc-Ex. Case studies like this one immediately bring in a more intersectional lens to the activity. 

Antidote Trees or Resilience Trees 

If you have time or are curious, you can transition from mapping the oppression tree to building an Antidote Tree or Resilience Tree to pivot the group toward action and collective care.

Popular Education Approaches 

However you use the tree, one of the strengths of the tool is when it is used alongside popular education approaches - specifically, a belief that the group already knows most of what it needs to know, and your job as an educator is to bring it to the surface. Resist the temptation to fill in the tree yourself, and resist the belief that people and groups have that they “don’t know”. In our experience, they most often do. It is a much more powerful tool when the group uses the structure of this metaphor to help them name and understand what they already know, and to fill in each other’s understandings.  

How the Tool Has Been Used 

The tool has been used and adapted by many different groups in Montreal and across Canada. For example, the tool was adapted to explore interrelated oppressions within our food systems. We stumbled across it being used as part of Concordia’s Sexual Violence Prevention Program.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, as Kira, Bex, Emily, and Annie were all involved in QPIRG - McGill at the time, the tool has been used widely in the PIRG network in Canada. 

Further afield, the tree metaphor can also be found as a tool for thinking through the similarities and differences between Jim Crow and the prison industrial complex. It was used to understand health inequities and how they might be addressed. 

We would love to hear if you have adapted or used the tool in any way!