Tagged With "Kinship Worldview"

Throughout the United States, Native communities are actively working to combat environmental racism and climate change. These Native leaders are working to elevate indigenous knowledge and practices as it relates to Native lands and natural resources. 1. Environmental justice is not a new idea in Native communities. It is important to acknowledge that Native communities have long had a different relationship with the environment compared to individuals from Western society. Although there...

Native Americans, however, have been hollering for generations about the global impact of fossil fuels and the poisoning of water, land, and fish from mining, industrial farming, and industry to anybody who would listen. Native folks knew that eventually non-Indigenous people would hear them and realize that no one is immune to the fallout from the colonialism and corporate greed that drives so much of our economy with little concern for the planet’s health. In the traditional Native...

Anthropologists have called Indigenous peoples the “original ecologists.” 19 Indigenous peoples were able to sustain their traditional subsistence economy for millennia because “they possessed appropriate ecological knowledge and suitable methods to exploit resources, but possessed a philosophy and environmental ethic to keep exploitive abilities in check, and established ground rules for relationships between humans and animals.” 20 Native peoples’ reciprocity with the natural and spiritual...

Some months ago, I was catching up with my dear friend and board member, Roberto Rivera . As an entrepreneur and community organizer with a doctorate and Lin-Manuel-Miranda-level freestyle abilities, he is a teacher to me in many ways. I was sharing with him that for a long time, I’ve struggled with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs . The traditional interpretation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is that humans need to fulfill their needs at one level before we can advance to higher levels. As...

Raging wildfires in California and Turkey, hurricanes in the U.S. southeast, flooding in West Africa, droughts in Iraq and Syria and other environmental catastrophes across the globe traumatize hundreds of thousands of people. Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, founder and director of Indigenous Climate Action , has a different view of these events than what we typically see. She says the trauma of climate change spans generations and is interwoven with colonization in the form of modern extraction...

Thunderbird Woman was the image that caught my eye at the Standing Rock water protector camps. As an Ojibwe woman, I immediately realized that the depiction was an example of my ancestors’ ancient spirit writings, or symbols, recorded on birch bark scrolls and on rock faces along the Great Lakes long before Europeans landed in America. Thunderbird Woman, with her winged arms outstretched, seemed to float on the canvases at Standing Rock, portraying a cosmology in which dynamic spiritual...

When the Evolved Nest is provisioned to children and to adults, our full humanity is developed and expressed. Through the Evolved Nest we develop the Kinship Worldview. Reimagining Humanity gives us a taste of the kind of lifeways that nestedness promotes.