Weaving Connections: Indigenous Wisdom for Uncertain Times
Building relationships, fostering resilience, and learning from ancestral traditions as we step into 2025
As we begin 2025, we wanted to reach out with heartfelt thanks. Your engagement and support of our conversation series has meant the world to us. These discussions have created meaningful connections and sparked important dialogues. If you'd like to donate to this collective effort, there's still time to contribute.
As we look to our Proven Sustainable communities for inspiration and practices of endurance and resilience they teach us that leaders, political parties and even nation states come and go.
And as they pass what remains are communities – human and beyond – that have found ways to persist, despite all predictions of their imminent demise. It is these ancestral and current traditions with whom we seek to learn and to forge alliances.
Forging alliance through building relationships is at the core of our work this year.
We are weaving strands in this basket of mutual support with several groups that you will hear more about in future newsletters. Here’s a taste of what’s to come:
In the coming months we are planning conversations with members of worldwide Indigenous communities that are supported by the Home Planet Fund with the help of our friend and colleague Dahr Jamail, Storyteller and Communication Manager for Home Planet Fund, host of Holding the Fire podcast series and one of our recent guests with Proven Sustainable. The Home Planet Fund works “to fund Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities living in frontline regions with the biggest potential to address the polycrisis, including remote communities, fragile ecosystems, and areas in conflict.”
We will also be speaking with media maker, ancestral scribe, educator and community organizer Tahila Mintz. Tahila is founder and executive director of OJI:SDA’, an organization that “expands Indigenous visibility, land literacy and good health by using innovative methods of sharing ancestral knowledge. Through media arts and authentic curriculum we focus on environmental protection, sustainability, community wellbeing, healing, and cultural vibrancy.”
Our dedicated Guiding Council member Four Arrows has recently introduced us to LaLa Zarraga, a member of the Cheran Indigenous people of Michoacán, Mexico and a future conversation partner. In his email introducing her he wrote: “I think the story, would be a good educational presentation because of how it was only in 2011 that their resistance started and brought them to be independent of both drug cartels that were destroying their forests, and the Mexico government’s own colonizing ways. When they became independent they focused on their own problems and replaced the more lucrative avocado farms with trees so as to protect water and the land.”
We know that this is a frightening and uncertain time for many of us living in the nation states of Turtle Island and beyond. We urge you to take comfort in the words of Beau Dick, Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwa Kwa Kay Wok) artist,
“They really tried their best to annihilate us completely. But guess what? We’re still here and we haven’t lost those values and those understandings that are so ancient.”
Listen to more thought provoking talks with Indigenous and Maroon people and their supporters to realize and challenge conscious and unconscious colonized thinking and behaviors influencing the way you perceive sustainability and engage with the world.
If you found this insightful, inspiring, or thought-prokoking in any way…
We’d love to hear your thoughts below. We’ll respond!